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Register a new userThe Myriad Uses of Instantons
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In quantum chromodynamics (QCD), the role which topologically non-trivial configurations play in splitting the singlet pseudo-Goldstone meson, the $eta^prime$, from the octet is familiar. In addition, such configurations contribute to other processes which violate the axial $U(1)_A$ symmetry. While the nature of topological fluctuations in the confined phase is still unsettled, at temperatures well above that for the chiral phase transition, they can be described by a dilute gas of instantons. We show that instantons of arbitrary topological charge $Q$ generate anomalous interactions between $2 N_f |Q|$ quarks, which for $Q = 1$ make the $eta^prime$ heavy. For two flavors we compute an anomalous quartic meson coupling and discuss its implications for the phenomenology of the chiral phase transition. A dilute instanton gas suggests that for cold, dense quarks, instantons do not evaporate until very high densities, when the baryon chemical potential is $gtrsim 2$ GeV.
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We calculate a new contribution to the axion mass that arises from gluons propagating in a 5th dimension at high energies. By uplifting the 4D instanton solution to five dimensions, the positive frequency modes of the Kaluza-Klein states generate a power-law term in the effective action that inversely grows with the instanton size. This causes 5D small instantons to enhance the axion mass in a way that does not spoil the axion solution to the strong CP problem. Moreover this enhancement can be much larger than the usual QCD contribution from large instantons, although it requires the 5D gauge theory to be near the non-perturbative limit. Thus our result suggests that the mass range of axions (or axion-like particles), which is important for ongoing experimental searches, can depend sensitively on the UV modification of QCD.
We show that open strings living on a D-brane which lies outside an AdS black hole can tunnel into the black hole through worldsheet instantons. These instantons have a simple interpretation in terms of thermal quarks in the dual Yang-Mills (YM) theory. As an application we calculate the width of a meson in a strongly coupled quark-gluon plasma which is described holographically as a massless mode on a D7 brane in AdS_5 times S_5. While the width of the meson is zero to all orders in the 1/sqrt{lambda} expansion with lambda the t Hooft coupling, it receives non-perturbative contributions in 1/sqrt{lambda} from worldsheet instantons. We find that the width increases quadratically with momentum at large momentum and comment on potential phenomenological implications of this enhancement for heavy ion collisions. We also comment on how this non-perturbative effect has important consequences for the phase structure of the YM theory obtained in the classical gravity limit.
Instanton is known to exist in Euclidean spacetime only. Their role in real time dynamics is usually understood as tunneling effect by Wick rotation. We illustrate other effects of instanton in holography by investigating 5d effective gravity theory of the black D3-brane-D-instanton system. The supergravity description of the D3-brane-D-instanton system is dual to the super Yang-Mills theory with topological excitations of the vacuum. We obtain Euclidean correlators in the presence of instantons by analyzing of the fluctuations of the bulk fields in the 5d effective theory. Furthermore, analytic continuation of Euclidean correlators leads to retarded correlators, which characterize real time dynamics. We find interestingly real time fluctuations of topological charge can destroy instantons and the lifetime of instanton is set by temperature. This implies instanton contribution to real time dynamics is suppressed at high temperature, which is analogous to classic field theory results that instanton contribution to thermodynamics is suppressed at high temperature.
We examine the contribution of small instantons to the axion mass in various UV completions of QCD. We show that the reason behind the potential dominance of such contributions is the non-trivial embedding of QCD into the UV theory. The effects from instantons in the partially broken gauge group appear as fractional instanton corrections in the effective theory. These will exhibit unusual dependences on the various scales in the problem whenever the index of embedding is non-trivial. We present a full one-instanton calculation of the axion mass in the simplest product group models, carefully keeping track of numerical prefactors. Rather than using a t Hooft operator approximation we directly evaluate the contributions to the vacuum bubble, automatically capturing the effects of closing up external fermion lines with Higgs loops. This approach is manifestly finite and removes the uncertainty associated with introducing a cutoff scale for the Higgs loops. We verify that the small instantons may dominate over the QCD contribution for very high breaking scales and at least three group factors.
We show that QCD instantons can generate large effects at small length scales in the ultraviolet in standard composite Higgs models that utilise partial compositeness. This has important implications for possible solutions of the strong CP problem in these models. First we show that in the simplest known UV completions of composite Higgs models, if an axion is also present, it can have a mass much larger than the usual QCD axion. Even more remarkable is the case where there are no axions, but the strong CP problem can be solved by generating the up quark mass entirely from the contribution of instantons thus reviving the massless up-quark solution for these models. In both cases no additional field content is required apart from what is required to realise partial compositeness.
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