We study chiral symmetry breaking in QCD-like gauge theories introducing a
confining effective propagator, as proposed recently by Cornwall, and
considering the effect of dynamical gauge boson mass generation. The effective
confining propagator has the form 1/(k2+m2)2 and we study the bifurcation
equation finding limits on m below which a satisfactory fermion mass solution
is generated. Since the coupling constant and gauge boson propagator are damped
in the infrared, due to the presence of dynamically massive gauge bosons, the
major part of the chiral breaking is only due to the confining propagator. We
study the asymptotic behavior of the gap equation containing confinement and
massive gauge boson exchange, and find that the symmetry breaking can be
approximated at some extent by an effective four-fermion interaction generated
by the confining propagator. We compute some QCD chiral parameters as a
function of m, finding values compatible with the experimental data. Within
this approach we expect that lattice simulations should not see large
differences between the confinement and chiral symmetry breaking scales
independent of the fermionic representation and we find a simple approximate
relation between the fermion condensate and dynamical mass for a given
representation as a function of the parameters appearing in the effective
confining propagator.Comment: 32 pages, 9 figures, new references added, matchs published versio