Instanton effects and chiral symmetry breaking in QCD2

A chiral fermion action allows one to do very clean studies of chiral symmetry breaking in QCD. I will briefly describe how to compute with the overlap action (relatively) cheaply, and then turn to physics: Low modes of the Dirac operator show a ``lumped'' chiral density which peaks at the locations of instantons and anti-instantons. These modes dominate correlation functions at small quark mass in many channels. The picture qualitatively (and in some cases quantitatively) re...

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 t...

In 2+1 dimensional gauge thories with $SU(N_c)$ color and $2N_f$ flavors of quarks in the fundamental representation, sphalerons, if present may lead to quark condensation and chiral symmetry breaking. The effect is similar to instanton induced chiral symmetry breaking in 3+1 dimensions and is due to the interaction of quark propagators with sphalerons. The existence of sphalerons requires that color symmetries be broken by a Higgs in the fundamental representation. We show t...

We propose a new way of understanding how chiral symmetry is realized in the high temperature phase of QCD. Based on the finding that a simple free instanton gas precisely describes the details of the lowest part of the spectrum of the lattice overlap Dirac operator, we propose an instanton-based random matrix model of QCD with dynamical quarks. Simulations of this model reveal that even for small quark mass the Dirac spectral density has a singularity at the origin, caused b...

We present a study of the QCD interactions which do not conserve the chirality of quarks. These non-perturbative forces are responsible for the violation of the U_A(1) charge conservation and for the breaking of chiral symmetry. From a systematic analysis we argue that the leading dynamical sources chirality flips are the interactions mediated by topological vacuum field fluctuations. We study in detail the contribution of instantons and derive a simple model-independent semi...

I address the question of how much of QCD in the chiral limit is reproduced by instantons. After reconstructing the instanton content of smoothed Monte Carlo lattice configurations, I compare hadron spectroscopy on this instanton ensemble to the spectroscopy on the original ``physical'' smoothed configurations using a chirally optimised clover fermion action. By studying the zero mode zone in simple instances I find that the optimised action gives a satisfactory description o...

Two dimensional massless Quantum Chromodynamics presents many features which resemble those of the true theory. In particular the spectrum consists of mesons and baryons arranged in flavor multiplets without parity doubling. We analyze the implications of chiral symmetry, which is not spontaneously broken in two dimensions, in the spectrum and in the quark condensate. We study how parity doubling, an awaited consequence of Coleman's theorem, is avoided due to the dimensionali...

We describe quenched spectroscopy in SU(2) gauge theory using smoothed gauge field configurations. We investigate 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 calculate the contribution of the instanton -- anti-instanton ($I\bar I$) pairs to the vacuum energy of QCD-like theories with $N_f$ light fermions using the saddle point method. We find a qualitative change of the behavior: for $N_f \ge 6$ it starts to oscillate with $N_f$. Similar behaviour was known for quantum mechanical systems interacting with fermions. We discuss the possible consequences of this phenomenon, and its relation to the mechanism of chiral symmetry break...

The spontaneous breaking of chiral symmetry (SBCS) is one of the most important phenomena of hadron physics. It defines the properties of all the light mesons and baryons. The Chiral Perturbation Theory (ChPT) encodes QCD hadronic correlators at low-energy region in the terms the low-energy constants (LEC) -- the expansion parameters on light quark current masses $m$ and external momenta $p$. The LEC's can be extracted from the phenomenology or from QCD lattice calculations. ...