Topological aspects of QCD

We review recent results from lattice on topological aspects of QCD: most of the results refer to monopoles and to instantons. We discuss in detail the evidence for condensation of monopoles in the vacuum and confinement of colour by dual superconductivity, and the major role of monopoles in dynamics (monopole dominance). As for instantons we review the $U(1)$ problem, a possible determination of the spin content of the proton, and new lattice data relevant to instanton liquid models.Comment: 8 pages, to be published in the Proceedings of Lattice 95, uuencoded postscript file. IFUP-TH 49/9

Renormalization Group Study of the soliton mass on the (lambda Phi^4)_{1+1} lattice model

We compute, on the $(\lambda \Phi^4)_{1+1}$ model on the lattice, the soliton mass by means of two very different numerical methods. First, we make use of a ``creation operator'' formalism, measuring the decay of a certain correlation function. On the other hand we measure the shift of the vacuum energy between the symmetric and the antiperiodic systems. The obtained results are fully compatible. We compute the continuum limit of the mass from the perturbative Renormalization Group equations. Special attention is paid to ensure that we are working on the scaling region, where physical quantities remain unchanged along any Renormalization Group Trajectory. We compare the continuum value of the soliton mass with its perturbative value up to one loop calculation. Both quantities show a quite satisfactory agreement. The first is slightly bigger than the perturbative one; this may be due to the contributions of higher order corrections.Comment: 19 pages, preprint DFTUZ/93/0

Free energy of an SU(2) monopole-antimonopole pair

We present a high-statistic numerical study of the free energy of a monopole-antimonopole pair in pure SU(2) theory. We find that the monopole-antimonopole interaction potential exhibits a screened behavior, as one would expect in presence of a monopole condensate. Screening occurs both in the low-temperature, confining phase of the theory, and in the high-temperature deconfined phase, with no evidence of a discontinuity of the screening mass across the transition. The mass of the object responsible for the screening at low temperature is approximately twice the established value for the lightest glueball, indicating a prevalent coupling to glueball excitations. At high temperature, the screening mass increases. We contrast the behavior of the quantum system with that of the corresponding classical system, where the monopole-antimonopole potential is of the Coulomb type.Comment: Latex, 22 pages, 8 figures. A mistake in the computer program implementing the multihistogram method has been corrected and all the affected numerical data have been revised. The main conclusions of the paper are unchanged, but the screening masses turn out somehow larger. (We thank Philippe de Forcrand for correspondence which helped us find the error.

Color confinement and dual superconductivity of the vacuum. III

It is demonstrated that monopole condensation in the confined phase of SU(2) and SU(3) gauge theories is independent of the specific Abelian projection used to define the monopoles. Hence the dual excitations which condense in the vacuum to produce confinement must have magnetic U(1) charge in all the Abelian projections. Some physical implications of this result are discussed.Comment: 6 pages, 5 postscript figure

Dual superconductivity in the SU(2) pure gauge vacuum: a lattice study

We investigate the dual superconductivity hypothesis in pure SU(2) lattice gauge theory. We focus on the dual Meissner effect by analyzing the distribution of the color fields due to a static quark-antiquark pair. We find evidence of the dual Meissner effect both in the maximally Abelian gauge and without gauge fixing. We measure the London penetration length. Our results suggest that the London penetration length is a physical gauge-invariant quantity. We put out a simple relation between the penetration length and the square root of the string tension. We find that our extimation is quite close to the extrapolated continuum limit available in the literature. A remarkable consequence of our study is that an effective Abelian theory can account for the long range properties of the SU(2) confining vacuum.Comment: 38 pages, uuencoded compressed (using GNU's gzip) tar file containing 1 LaTeX2e file (to be processed 3 times) + 16 encapsulated Postscript figures. A full Postscript version of this paper is available at http://www.ba.infn.it/disk$gruppo_4/cosmai/www/papers/195-95.P

Antibaryon density in the central rapidity region of a heavy ion collision

We consider (anti-)baryons production in heavy ion collisions as production of topological defects during the chiral phase transition. Non-zero quark masses which explicitly break chiral symmetry supress the (anti-)baryon density. Hardly any (anti-)baryons will be produced in the central rapidity region of a heavy ion collision.Comment: 3 pages in RevTex, 3 .ps file

QCD analysis of inclusive B decay into charmonium

We compute the decay rates and $H$-energy distributions of $B$ mesons into the final state $H+X$, where $H$ can be any one of the $S$-wave or $P$-wave charmonia, at next-to-leading order in the strong coupling. We find that a significant fraction of the observed $J/\psi$, $\psi'$ and $\chi_c$ must be produced through $c\bar{c}$ pairs in a colour octet state and should therefore be accompanied by more than one light hadron. At the same time we obtain stringent constraints on some of the long-distance parameters for colour octet production.Comment: 40 pages, RevTeX, 4 figure

Hyperon Polarization in the Constituent Quark Model

We consider mechanism for hyperon polarization in inclusive production. The main role belongs to the orbital angular momentum and polarization of the strange quark-antiquark pairs in the internal structure of the constituent quarks. We consider a nucleon as a core consisting of the constituent quarks embedded into quark condensate. The nonperturbative hadron structure is based on the results of chiral quark models.Comment: 14 pages, LaTeX, 2 Figures, References adde

Quarkonium momentum distributions in photoproduction and B decay

According to our present understanding many $J/\psi$ production processes proceed through a coloured $c\bar{c}$ state followed by the emission of soft particles in the quarkonium rest frame. The kinematic effect of soft particle emission is usually a higher-order effect in the non-relativistic expansion, but becomes important near the kinematic endpoint of quarkonium energy (momentum) distributions. In an intermediate region a systematic resummation of the non-relativistic expansion leads to the introduction of so-called `shape functions'. In this paper we provide an implementation of the kinematic effect of soft gluon emission which is consistent with the non-relativistic shape function formalism in the region where it is applicable and which models the extreme endpoint region. We then apply the model to photoproduction of $J/\psi$ and $J/\psi$ production in $B$ meson decay. A satisfactory description of $B$ decay data is obtained. For inelastic charmonium photoproduction we conclude that a sensible comparison of theory with data requires a transverse momentum cut larger than the currently used 1 GeV.Comment: latex, 45 pages; (v2) some typos corrected, version to appear in PR