Topological objects in QCD

Topological excitations are prominent candidates for explaining nonperturbative effects in QCD like confinement. In these lectures, I cover both formal treatments and applications of topological objects. The typical phenomena like BPS bounds, topology, the semiclassical approximation and chiral fermions are introduced by virtue of kinks. Then I proceed in higher dimensions with magnetic monopoles and instantons and special emphasis on calorons. Analytical aspects are discussed and an overview over models based on these objects as well as lattice results is given.Comment: 28 pages, 17 figures; Lectures given at 45th Internationale Universitaetswochen fuer Theoretische Physik (International University School of Theoretical Physics): Conceptual and Numerical Challenges in Femto- and Peta-Scale Physics, Schladming, Styria, Austria, 24 Feb - 3 Mar 200

Filtered topological structure of the QCD vacuum: Effects of dynamical quarks

We systematically compare filtering methods used to extract topological structures on SU(3) lattice configurations. We show that there is a strong correlation of the topological charge densities obtained by APE and Stout smearing. To get rid of artifacts of these methods, we analyse structures that are also seen by Laplace filtering and indeed identify artifacts for strong smearing. The topological charge density in this combined analysis is more fragmented in the presence of dynamical quarks. A power law exponent that characterises the distribution of filtered topological clusters turns out to be not far off the values of an instanton gas model.Comment: 7 pages, 6 figures, final version to appear in PL

Pointlike Hopf defects in Abelian projections

We present a new kind of defect in Abelian Projections, stemming from pointlike zeros of second order. The corresponding topological quantity is the Hopf invariant pi_3(S^2) (rather than the winding number pi_2(S^2) for magnetic monopoles). We give a visualisation of this quantity and discuss the simplest non-trivial example, the Hopf map. Such defects occur in the Laplacian Abelian gauge in a non-trivial instanton sector. For general Abelian projections we show how an ensemble of Hopf defects accounts for the instanton number.Comment: talk given at the XVIII Autumn School `Topology of strongly correlated systems', Lisbon, October 2000; to appear in the proceedings (World Scientific); latex, 4 pages, 2 figure

On the zero of the fermion zero mode

We argue that the fermionic zero mode in non-trivial gauge field backgrounds must have a zero. We demonstrate this explicitly for calorons where its location is related to a constituent monopole. Furthermore a topological reasoning for the existence of the zero is given which therefore will be present for any non-trivial configuration. We propose the use of this property in particular for lattice simulations in order to uncover the topological content of a configuration.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures in 5 part

Hopf defects as seeds for monopole loops

We investigate the relation between instantons and monopoles in the Laplacian Abelian Gauge using analytical methods in the continuum. Our starting point is the fact that the 't Hooft instanton with its high symmetry leads to a pointlike defect with Hopf invariant one. In order to generalise this result we partly break the symmetry by a local perturbation. We find that for generic configurations near the 't Hooft instanton the defects become loops. The analytical results show explicitly that these defects are magnetic monopoles with unit charge. In addition, the monopoles are twisted to account for the instanton number of the background.Comment: latex, 6 pages, 2 figures; v2: references added, emphasis modified, conclusions unchange

Laplacian modes as a filter

We compute low-lying eigenmodes of the gauge covariant Laplace operator on the lattice at finite temperature. For classical configurations we show how the lowest mode localizes the monopole constituents inside calorons and that it hops upon changing the boundary conditions. The latter effect we observe for thermalized backgrounds, too, analogously to what is known for fermion zero modes. We propose a new filter for equilibrium configurations which provides link variables as a truncated sum involving the Laplacian modes. This method not only reproduces classical structures, but also preserves the confining potential, even when only a few modes are used.Comment: talk presented by FB at the Workshop on Computational Hadron Physics, Nikosia (Cyprus), Sept. 14-17, 2005; compared to hep-lat/0509020 and hep-lat/0509087 we have added the following points: 1. the kinetic term (square of the covariant derivative) as an analyzing observable, 2. the correlation of filtered link variables to the original ones, 3. the filtered string tension from modes with shifted ordinal number; 8 pages, 8 figures, uses espcrc2.st