Self-Intersection, Axial Anomaly and the String Picture of QCD

The leading, planar diagrams of the $1/N_c$ expansion and the usual string description suggest that quarks propagate on the boundary of a two-dimensional world surface. We restrict the quarks to the boundary of the world surface by giving them infinitely large mass on the interior of the surface and zero mass on its boundary and show that in this picture the QCD $\theta$--vacua can be represented by the self-intersection number (or equivalently by the first Chern number of the normal bundle) of the surface.