English

Raymond and instantons: some recollections and the use of ADHM

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2016-12-21 v1 History and Philosophy of Physics

Abstract

After the discovery of the BRST identities in 1974 Raymond spent some two years mostly on instantons. In those years we had a small group at the Centre Physique Th\'eorique in Marseille discussing the physics and mathematics of instantons. The upshot of our discussions can be found in a set of lectures given by Raymond in Erice in 1977 and a year later in a Physics Reports volume. I present some recollections of that period; mostly how we were influenced by the twistor approach. I discuss the Atiyah-Drinfeld-Hitchin-Manin (ADHM) method to obtain instantons ("calorons") in thermal QCD following earlier work. The building blocks are a prepotential and a gauge invariant propagator. Then I will give surprisingly simple results in terms of these building blocks for the one loop vacuum response to a change in caloron parameters and some physical consequences for the effective action, in particular screening properties.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1611.01859,
  title  = {Raymond and instantons: some recollections and the use of ADHM},
  author = {Chris P. Korthals Altes},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1611.01859},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

20 pages, two figures