English

Pointlike Hopf defects in Abelian projections

High Energy Physics - Theory 2017-08-23 v1

Abstract

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.

Cite

@article{arxiv.hep-th/0012004,
  title  = {Pointlike Hopf defects in Abelian projections},
  author = {Falk Bruckmann},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:hep-th/0012004},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

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 figures

R2 v1 2026-07-22T15:01:23.337Z