Chiral Symmetry Breaking and Scalar Confinement

We address the old difficulty in accommodating the scalar quark-antiquark confining potential together with chiral symmetry breaking. We develop a quark confining potential inspired in the QCD scalar flux tube. The coupling to quarks consists in a double vector vertex. We study the Dirac and spin structure of this potential. In the limit of massless quarks the quark vertex is vector. Nevertheless symmetry breaking generates a new scalar quark vertex. In the heavy quark limit the coupling is mostly scalar. We solve the mass gap equation and find that this potential produces spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking for light quarks. The quantitative results of this model are encouraging.