2012/01/31 by Edward Shuryak, Tin Sulejmanpašić, Tin Sulejmanpasic · 2 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Chiral symmetry #Chiral symmetry breaking #Dyon #Fermion #Holonomy #Instanton #Lattice (music) #Lattice QCD #Lattice constant #Magnetic monopole #Mathematical physics #Physics #Physics of Superconductivity and Magnetism #QCD vacuum #Quantum Chromodynamics and Particle Interactions #Quantum chromodynamics #Quantum mechanics #Theoretical and Computational Physics #Topology (electrical circuits) #hep-lat #hep-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevd.86.036001
31 pages, 16. figures. V3 version has corrected type-os and minor changes to the text
arxiv created 2012/08/06 · openalex publication_date 2012/08/08 · arxiv updated 2012/08/10 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
We discuss the topological phenomena in the QCD-like theories with a variable number of fundamental fermions Nf, focusing on the temperatures at or above the critical value Tc of chiral symmetry restoration. The nonzero average of the Polyakov line, or holonomy, splits instantons into (anti)self-dual dyons, and we study both the bosonic and fermionic interactions between them. The high temperature phase is a dilute gas of ``molecules'' made of 2Nc dyons, neutral in topological, electric, and magnetic charges. At intermediate temperatures the diluteness of the ``molecular gas'' reaches some critical level at which chiral symmetry gets restored: we comment on why it is different for the fundamental and adjoint fermions. At high density the ensemble is a strongly coupled liquid with crystal-like short range order: we speculate about its possible structure at small and large Nf. We finally show that certain lattice observations are in agreement with the proposed model, and suggest a number of further lattice tests.