Parity doublers in chiral potential quark models

The effect of spontaneous breaking of chiral symmetry over the spectrum of highly excited hadrons is addressed in the framework of a microscopic chiral potential quark model (Generalised Nambu-Jona-Lasinio model) with a vectorial instantaneous quark kernel of a generic form. A heavy-light quark-antiquark bound system is considered, as an example, and the Lorentz nature of the effective light-quark potential is identified to be a pure Lorentz-scalar, for low-lying states in the spectrum, and to become a pure spatial Lorentz vector, for highly excited states. Consequently, the splitting between the partners in chiral doublets is demonstrated to decrease fast in the upper part of the spectrum so that neighboring states of an opposite parity become almost degenerate. A detailed microscopic picture of such a "chiral symmetry restoration" in the spectrum of highly excited hadrons is drawn and the corresponding scale of restoration is estimated.