Nucleon Helicity in Pion Photoproduction

Pion-photoproduction data is examined to check for the nucleon-helicity conservation predicted by asymptotic QCD. The differential cross section shows agreement with constituent-counting rules, and polarization data is not in disagreement with conservation of nucleon helicity. However large uncertainties in the polarization measurements do not allow a conclusive statement. The helicity amplitudes from a partial-wave analysis are also examined for helicity conservation. While the amplitudes become small as $s$ increases, the $s$ dependence of the helicity-conserving amplitudes is similar to the dependence of the non-conserving amplitudes.Comment: plain tex, 6 pages, 8 figure

Monopole Condensation and Dimensional Transmutation in SU(2) QCD

We resolve the controversy on the stability of the monopole condensation in the one-loop effective action of SU(2) QCD by calculating the imaginary part of the effective action with two different methods at one-loop order. Our result confirms that the effective action for the magnetic background has no imaginary part but the one for the electric background has a negative imaginary part. This assures that the monopole condensation is indeed stable, but the electric background becomes unstable due to the pair-annihilation of gluons.Comment: 13 pages, 2 figure