We quantitatively examine the extent to which instanton degress of freedom, contained within standard Monte-carlo generated gauge-field configurations, can maintain the characteristic features of the mass and renormalisation functions of the non-perturbative quark propagator. We use over-improved stout-link smearing to isolate instanton effects on the lattice. Using a variety of measures, we illustrate how gauge fields consisting almost solely of instanton-like objects are produced after only 50 sweeps of smearing. We find a full vacuum, with a packing fraction more than three times larger than phenomenological models predict. We calculate the overlap quark propagator on these smeared configurations, and find that even at high levels of smearing the majority of the characteristic features of the propagator are reproduced. We thus conclude that instantons contained within standard Monte-carlo generated gauge-field configurations are the degrees of freedom responsible for the dynamical generation of mass observed in lattice QCD.
In order to optimize cooling as a technique to study the instanton content of the QCD vacuum, we have studied the effects of alternative algorithms, improved actions and boundary conditions on the evolution of single instantons and instanton anti-instanton pairs. Using these results, we have extracted and compared the instanton content of quenched and full QCD.
Evidence from lattice QCD calculations is presented showing that instantons and their associated zero modes play a major role in the physics of light hadrons and the propagation of light quarks in the QCD vacuum.
Lattice field theory provides a quantitative tool to study the role of nonperturbative semiclassical configurations in QCD. This talk briefly reviews our present understanding of the role of instantons in QCD and describes in detail new developments in the study of merons on the lattice.
We consider a recent proposal by Horváth {\em et al.} to address the question whether topological charge fluctuations in QCD are instanton dominated via the response of fermions using lattice fermions with exact chiral symmetry, the overlap fermions. Considering several volumes and lattice spacings we find strong evidence for chirality of a finite density of low-lying eigenvectors of the overlap-Dirac operator in the regions where these modes are peaked. This result suggests instanton dominance of topological charge fluctuations in quenched QCD.
We comment on the recent paper (hep-lat/0102003) by Horvath, Isgur, McCune, and Thacker, which concludes that the local chiral structure of fermionic eigenmodes is not consistent with instanton dominance. Our calculations, done with an overlap action, suggest the opposite conclusion.
The correlation between instantons and QCD-monopoles is studied both in the lattice gauge theory and in the continuum theory. An analytical study in the Polyakov-like gauge, where $A_4(x)$ is diagonalized, shows that the QCD-monopole trajectory penetrates the center of each instanton, and becomes complicated in the multi-instanton system. Using the SU(2) lattice with $16^4$, the instanton number is measured in the singular (monopole-dominating) and regular (photon-dominating) parts, respectively. The monopole dominance for the topological charge is found both in the maximally abelian gauge and…
Cooling is used as a filter on a set of gluon fields sampling the Wilson action to selectively remove essentially all fluctuations of the gluon field except for the instantons. The close agreement between quenched lattice QCD results with cooled and uncooled configurations for vacuum correlation functions of hadronic currents and for density-density correlation functions in hadronic bound states provides strong evidence for the dominant role of instantons in determining light hadron structure and quark propagation in the QCD vacuum.
Cooling is used as a filter on a set of gluon fields sampling the Wilson action to selectively remove essentially all fluctuations of the gluon field except for the instantons. The close agreement between quenched lattice QCD results with cooled and uncooled configurations for vacuum correlation functions of hadronic currents and for density-density correlation functions in hadronic bound states provides strong evidence for the dominant role of instantons in determining light hadron structure and quark propagation in the QCD vacuum.
We investigate the temperature dependence of the instanton contents of gluon fields, using unquenched lattice QCD and the cooling method. The instanton size parameter deduced from the correlation function decreases from 0.44fm below the phase-transition temperature $T_c$ ($\approx 150$MeV) to 0.33fm at 1.3 $T_c$. The instanton charge distribution is Poissonian above $T_c$, but it deviates from the convoluted Poisson at low temperature. The topological susceptibility decreases rapidly below $T_c$, showing the apparent restoration of the $U(1)_A$ symmetry already at $T \approx T_c$.
The confinement mechanism in the nonperturbative QCD is studied in terms of topological excitation as QCD-monopoles and instantons. In the 't Hooft abelian gauge, QCD is reduced into an abelian gauge theory with monopoles, and the QCD vacuum can be regarded as the dual superconductor with monopole condensation, which leads to the dual Higgs mechanism. The monopole-current theory extracted from QCD is found to have essential features of confinement. We find also close relation between monopoles and instantons using the lattice QCD. In this framework, the lowest $0^{++}$ glueball (1.5 $\sim$ 1.7…
This talk is a review of our studies of instantons and their properties as seen in our lattice simulations of SU(2) gauge theory. We have measured the topological susceptibility and the size distribution of instantons in the QCD vacuum. We have also investigated the properties of quarks moving in instanton background field configurations, where the sizes and locations of the instantons are taken from simulations of the full gauge theory. By themselves, these multi-instanton configurations do not confine quarks, but they induce chiral symmetry breaking.
We summarize our current understanding of instantons in the large N_c limit of QCD. We also present some recent results from simulations of the instanton liquid in QCD for N_c>3.
The role of instanton-like objects in the QCD vacuum on the mass spectrum of low-lying light hadrons is explored in lattice QCD. Using over-improved stout-link smearing, tuned to preserve instanton-like objects in the QCD vacuum, the evolution of the mass spectrum under smearing is examined. The calculation is performed using a $20^3\times40$ dynamical fat-link-irrelevant-clover (FLIC) fermion action ensemble with lattice spacing 0.126 fm. Through the consideration of a range of pion masses, the effect of the vacuum instanton content is compared at a common pion mass. While the qualitative fea…
To elucidate the role played by instantons in chiral symmetry breaking, we explore their properties in full QCD, around the critical temperature. We study in particular spatial correlations between low-lying Dirac eigenmodes and instantons. Our measurements are compared with the predictions of instanton-based models.
We study the relation between instantons and monopoles in the abelian gauge. First, we investigate the monopole in the multi-instanton solution in the continuum Yang-Mills theory using the Polyakov gauge. At a large instanton density, the monopole trajectory becomes highly complicated, which can be regarded as a signal of monopole condensation. Second, we study instantons and monopoles in the SU(2) lattice gauge theory both in the maximally abelian (MA) gauge and in the Polyakov gauge. Using the $16^3 \times 4$ lattice, we find monopole dominance for instantons in the confinement phase even at…
We consider the local chirality of near-zero eigenvectors from Wilson-Dirac and clover improved Wilson-Dirac lattice operators as proposed recently by Horváth et al. We studied finer lattices and repaired for the loss of orthogonality due to the non-normality of the Wilson-Dirac matrix. As a result we do see a clear double peak structure on lattices with resolutions higher than 0.1 fm. We found that the lattice artifacts can be considerably reduced by exploiting the biorthogonal system of left and right eigenvectors. We conclude that the dominance of instantons on topological charge fluctuatio…
To elucidate the role in hadron structure of quark zero modes associated with instantons, the lowest eigenfunctions of the Dirac operator have been calculated in quenched QCD, full QCD, and full QCD with cooling. Eigenmodes associated with a single instanton and an instanton-anti-instanton pair were studied to understand the role of lattice artifacts for Wilson Fermions. By truncating the spectral representation of the quark propagator, we show that the rho and pion contributions to the vector and pseudoscalar correlation functions are dominated by the zero-mode contributions.
Approximating the sum over all gauge field configurations in the QCD partition function by a liquid of instantons, we calculate the spectrum of the Dirac operator for two and three colors and for 0, 1 and 2 flavors. We find a remarkable difference in the spectrum near zero virtuality between 2 and 3 colors, which can be explained in terms of chiral random matrix theory. For two colors the Dirac operator is real, and the appropriate random matrix ensemble has real matrix elements. For three colors the Dirac operator is complex, and the spectrum can be described by a random matrix ensemble with …
We study instanton effects in QCD at very high baryon density. In this regime instantons are suppressed by a large power of $(Λ_{QCD}/μ)$, where $Λ_{QCD}$ is the QCD scale parameter and $μ$ is the baryon chemical potential. Instantons are nevertheless important because they contribute to several physical observables that vanish to all orders in perturbative QCD. We study, in particular, the chiral condensate and its contribution $m_{GB}^2\sim m<\barψψ>$ to the masses of Goldstone bosons in the CFL phase of QCD with $N_f=3$ flavors. We find that at densities $ρ\sim (5-10) ρ_0$, where $ρ_0$ is t…
We examined the instanton contribution to the QCD configurations generated from lattice QCD for $N_F=0$, $N_F=2+1$ and $N_F=2+1+1$ dynamical quark flavors from two different and complementary approaches. First via the use of Gradient flow, we computed instanton liquid properties using an algorithm to localize instantons in the gauge field configurations and studied their evolution with flow time. Then, the analysis of the running at low momenta of gluon Green's functions serves as an independent confirmation of the instanton density which can also be derived without the use of the Gradient flo…
APE smearing and overlap-Dirac operator are combined to filter QCD vacuum configurations. The results obtained from overlap fermions and improved 5Li cooling are compared, both of them exhibit structures of dilute liquid of instanton. Finally the overlap fermions, improved 5Li cooling and APE smearing are combined to calculate the topological charge and identify the structure of QCD vacuum. The results suggest dilute liquid of instanton dominance of topological charge fluctuations in quenched lattice QCD.
QCD point-to-point correlation functions at distances .2-1 fm are very different for different channels, and they tell us a lot about inter-quark interactions. Recent studies based on experimental data, 'instanton liquid' approach and lattice measurements are reviewed. Agreement between all of them show that instanton-induced forces dominate the light quark physics, and new findings by Negele et al, that {\it hadrons survive 'cooling'}, make this statement obvious. We also argue that {\it chiral symmetery restoration} is due to breaking of the 'instanton liquid' into {\it polarized} 'instanton…
A ``fiducial'' kinematical region for our calculations of instanton (I)-induced processes at HERA within I-perturbation theory is extracted from recent lattice simulations of QCD. Moreover, we present the finalized I-induced cross-sections exhibiting a strongly reduced residual dependence on the renormalization scale.
We argue that lattice calculations of the $η'$ mass in QCD with $N_c=2$ colors performed at non-zero baryon chemical potential can be used to study the mechanism responsible for the mass of the $η'$. QCD with two colors is an ideal laboratory because it exhibits confinement, chiral symmetry breaking and a would-be $U(1)_A$ Goldstone boson at all densities. Since the instanton density and the confinement scale vary with density in a very different way, instantons are clearly distinguishable from other possible mechanisms. There is an instanton prediction for the $η'$ mass at large density that …
We show, without using semiclassical approximations, that, in high-temperature QCD with chiral symmetry restoration and U(1) axial symmetry breaking, the partition function for sufficiently light quarks can be expressed as an ensemble of noninteracting objects with topological charge that obey the Poisson statistics. We argue that the topological objects are "quasi-instantons" (rather than bare instantons) taking into account quantum effects. Our result is valid even close to the (pseudo)critical temperature of the chiral phase transition.
We review our ongoing theoretical and phenomenological study of the discovery potential for instanton-induced events in deep-inelastic scattering (DIS) at HERA. Constraints from recent lattice simulations will be exploited and translated into a ``fiducial'' kinematical region for our predictions of the instanton-induced DIS cross-section.
We analyze the interplay of topological objects in four-dimensional QCD on the lattice. The distributions of color magnetic monopoles in the maximum abelian gauge are computed around instantons in both pure and full QCD. We find an enhanced probability for monopoles inside the core of an instanton on gauge field average. This feature is independent of the topological charge definition used. For specific gauge field configurations we visualize the situation graphically. Moreover we investigate how monopole loops and instantons are correlated with the chiral condensate. Strong evidence is found …
A Coulomb gas representation of dense-matter QCD is derived from a dual transformation of the low-energy effective Lagrangian. The point-like charges Q=+1,-1 of the gas are identified with the instantons and anti-instantons of such topological charges. An instanton repels another instanton with the same force as it attracts an anti-instanton, in contrast to the semiclassical interaction.
We review the theory and phenomenology of instantons in QCD. After a general overview, we provide a pedagogical introduction to semi-classical methods in quantum mechanics and field theory. The main part of the review summarizes our understanding of the instanton liquid in QCD and the role of instantons in generating the spectrum of light hadrons. We also discuss properties of instantons at finite temperature and the chiral phase transition. We give an overview over the importance of instantons in some other models, in particular two dimensional sigma models, electroweak theory and supersymmet…
The correlation between instantons and QCD-monopoles is studied both in the lattice gauge theory and in the continuum theory. From a simple topological consideration, instantons are expected to live only around the QCD-monopole trajectory in the abelian gauge. First, the instanton solution is analytically studied in the Polyakov-like gauge, where $A_4(x)$ is diagonalized. The world line of the QCD-monopole is found to be penetrate the center of each instanton inevitably. For the single-instanton solution, the QCD-monopole trajectory becomes a simple straight line. On the other hand, in the mul…
In this paper we study the statistical mechanics of the instanton liquid in QCD. After introducing the partition function as well as the gauge field and quark induced interactions between instantons we describe a method to calculate the free energy of the instanton system. We use this method to determine the equilibrium density and the equation of state from numerical simulations of the instanton ensemble in QCD for various numbers of flavors. We find that there is a critical number of flavors above which chiral symmetry is restored in the groundstate. In the physical case of two light and one…
We investigate the temperature dependence of the instanton content of gluon fields and their contribution to quark correlation using quenched lattice QCD and the cooling method. We found a suppression of the topological susceptibility at finite temperature, agreeing with the PCAC expectation at low temperature and enhanced suppression for temperatures at and above the deconfinement transition. For temperatures up to about 334 MeV, the topological charge correlation agrees well with a single instanton profile, though the size parameter seems to change across the phase transition. The screening …
A large body of evidence from lattice calculations indicates that instantons play a major role in the physics of light hadrons. This evidence is summarized, and recent results concerning the instanton content of the SU(3) vacuum, instanton contributions to the static potential, and a new class of instanton solutions at finite temperature are reviewed.
In the holographic model of QCD, theta dependence sharply changes at the point of confinement deconfinement phase transition. In large N QCD such a change in theta behavior can be related to the breakdown of the instanton expansion at some critical temperature T_c. Associating this temperature with confinement-deconfinement phase transition leads to the description of the latter in terms of dissociation of instantons into the fractionally charged instanton quarks. To elucidate this picture, we introduce the nonvanishing chiral condensate in the deconfining phase and assume a specific lagrangia…
The influence of nonperturbative fields on instantons in quantum chromodynamics is studied. Nonperturbative vacuum is described in terms of nonlocal gauge invariant vacuum averages of gluon field strength.Effective action for instanton is derived in bilocal approximation and it is demonstrated that stochastic background gluon fields are responsible for infra-red (IR) stabilization of instantons. Dependence of characteristic instanton size on gluon condensate and correlation length in nonperturbative vacuum is found. Comparison of obtained instanton size distribution with lattice data is made.
We investigate instantons in finite temperature QCD via Witten's holographic QCD. To study the deconfinement phase, we use the setup proposed in [1] (arXiv:1107.4048). We find that the sizes of the instantons are stabilized at certain values both in the confinement and deconfinement phases. This agrees with the numerical result in the lattice gauge theory. Besides we find that the gravity duals of the large and small instantons in the deconfinement phase have different topologies. We also argue that the fluctuation of the topological charges is large in confinement phase while it is exponentia…
We exploit a recent lattice investigation (UKQCD) on the topological structure of the (quenched) QCD vacuum, in order to gain information on crucial building blocks of instanton perturbation theory. A central motivation is to further constrain our previous predictions of instanton-induced hard scattering processes. First, we address the generic problem of extracting quantitative information from cooled lattice data. We find a new scaling variable, interpreted as a "cooling radius", which allows to combine lattice data for a whole range of lattice spacings and cooling sweeps. This variable stro…
We aim to show the effects of the magnetic monopoles and instantons in quantum chromodynamics (QCD) on observables; therefore, we introduce a monopole and anti-monopole pair in the QCD vacuum of a quenched SU(3) by applying the monopole creation operator to the vacuum. We calculate the eigenvalues and eigenvectors of the overlap Dirac operator that preserves the exact chiral symmetry in lattice gauge theory using these QCD vacua. We then investigate the effects of magnetic monopoles and instantons. First, we confirm the monopole effects as follows: (i) The monopole creation operator makes the …
Signals of QCD instanton-induced processes are searched for in neutral current deep-inelastic scattering at the electron-proton collider HERA in the kinematic region defined by the Bjorken-scaling variable $x > 10^{-3}$, the inelasticity $0.2< y < 0.7$ and the photon virtuality $150 < Q^2 < 15000$ GeV$^2$. The search is performed using H1 data corresponding to an integrated luminosity of ~$351$ pb$^{-1}$. No evidence for the production of QCD instanton-induced events is observed. Upper limits on the cross section for instanton-induced processes between $1.5$~pb and $6$~pb, at $95\%$~ confidenc…
We investigate the contribution of instantons to the eigenvalue spectrum of the Dirac operator in quenched QCD. The instanton configurations that we use have been derived, elsewhere, from cooled SU(3) lattice gauge fields and, for comparison, we also analyse a random `gas' of instantons. Using a set of simplifying approximations, we find a non-zero chiral condensate. However we also find that the spectral density diverges for small eigenvalues, so that the chiral condensate, at zero quark mass, diverges in quenched QCD. The degree of divergence decreases with the instanton density, so that it …
We report on an instanton-based analysis of the gluon Green functions in the Landau gauge for low momenta; in particular we use lattice results for $α_s$ in the symmetric momentum subtraction scheme (${\rm MOM}$) for large-volume lattice simulations. We have exploited quenched gauge field configurations, $N_f=0$, with both Wilson and tree-level Symanzik improved actions, and unquenched ones with $N_f=2+1$ and $N_f=2+1+1$ dynamical flavors (domain wall and twisted-mass fermions, respectively). We show that the dominance of instanton correlations on the low-momenta gluon Green functions can be a…
The Interacting Instanton Liquid Model is used to explore the role of instanton induced dynamics in hadron structure. To support the validity of this model in the chiral regime, the quark mass dependencies of several properties are shown to agree with chiral perturbation theory, including the density of eigenmodes of the Dirac operator and the masses of the pion and nucleon. A quark mass m* = 80 MeV emerging naturally from the model is shown to specify the mass scale above which the fermion determinant is suppressed, the zero modes become subdominant, and the density of quasi-zero modes become…
We investigate the contribution that instantons make to the QCD chiral condensate for Nf= 0, 1 and 2 quark flavours. We use a simplified model: the instantons are a (weighted) gas, the fermionic integrations are restricted to the subspace spanned by the would-be zero-modes and only the dimensional and chiral features of the Dirac operator are retained. Previous work along these lines found a power-like divergence of the Dirac spectral density at zero eigenvalue. By changing the various components of the model, we show that a power divergence appears to be a generic feature of instanton mixing …
In this paper we discuss new flavored space-like defects in confined QCD which can be considered as the Euclidean extended instantons carrying the topologically quantized currents. We focus on the simplest 1d space-like defect - the S-Skyrmion solution extended in one space coordinate and localized in Euclidean time. It can be identified both in the holographic QCD and in the Chiral Perturbation Theory(ChPT). The Skyrmion charges get transformed into the corresponding currents for S-Skyrmion. The analogy with the Thouless pump and the quantum phase slip phenomena is mentioned.
We comment on the recent paper (hep-lat/0005006) by Isgur and Thacker on the origin of the OZI rule in QCD. We show that instantons explain the sign and magnitude of the observed OZI-violating amplitude in all mesonic channels, not just in the $η'$ channel. We comment on the role of instantons in hadronic spectroscopy and the relation between instantons and the large $N_c$ limit of QCD.
Recently it was shown that in QCD-like theories with $N_f > N$, where $N_f$ is the number of light flavors and $N$ is the number of colors, there are correlation functions that vanish in perturbation theory and at short distances receive dominant, calculable contributions from small instantons. Here we extend the set of such objects to theories with $N_f = N$, which includes real QCD, and discuss their application as a calibration of lattice computations at small quark mass. We revisit the related issue of the $u$ quark mass and its additive renormalization by small instantons, and discuss an …
In the chiral magnetic effect, there is a competition between a strong magnetic field, which tends to project positively charged particles to have spin aligned along the magnetic field, and a chirality imbalance which may be produced locally by a topologically nontrivial gauge field such as an instanton. We study the properties of the Euclidean Dirac equation for a light fermion in the presence of both a constant abelian magnetic field and an SU(2) instanton. In particular, we analyze the zero modes analytically in various limits, both on R^4 and on the four-torus, in order to compare with rec…
The low-lying eigenmodes of the Dirac operator associated with typical gauge field configurations in QCD encode, among other low-energy properties, the physics behind the solution to the $U_A(1)$ problem (i.e. the origin of the $η'$ mass), the nature of spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking, and the physics of string-breaking, quark-antiquark pair production, and the OZI rule. Moreover, the space-time chiral structure of these eigenmodes reflects the space-time topological structure of the underlying gauge field. We present evidence from lattice QCD on the local chiral structure of low Dirac ei…
Probing QCD instantons using jet correlation observables in proton-proton collisions at the LHC
The Institute of Mathematical Sciences（数学科学研究所）；Homi Bhabha National Institute（霍米·巴巴国立研究所）；Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER)（印度科学与教育研究所）
We estimate the splitting between the spatial correlation lengths in the scalar and pseudoscalar channels in QCD at high temperature. The splitting is due to the contribution of the instanton/anti-instanton chains in the thermal ensemble, even though instanton contributions to thermodynamic quantities are suppressed. The splitting vanishes at asymptotically high temperatures as $ΔM/M\propto (Λ_{QCD}/T)^b$, where $b$ is the beta function coefficient.
We study the spectrum and eigenmodes of the QCD Dirac operator in a gauge background given by an Instanton Liquid Model (ILM) at temperatures around the chiral phase transition. For two massless quark flavors we observe that at the chiral phase transition, both the low lying eigenmodes and the spectrum of the QCD Dirac operator resemble those of a disordered conductor at the Anderson transition. In particular we present results showing that the eigenvectors are multifractal and the spectral correlations are well described by critical statistics. We also find an additional temperature dependent…
We investigate the instanton dynamics of asymptotically safe and free quantum field theories featuring respectively controllable ultraviolet and infrared fixed points. We start by briefly reviewing the salient points about the instanton calculus for pure Yang Mills (YM) and QCD. We then move on to determine the role of instantons within the controllable regime of the QCD conformal window. In this region we add a fermion-mass operator and determine the density of instantons per unit volume as function of the fermion mass. Finally, for the first time, we extend the instanton calculus to asymptot…
