Related papers: Melting Instantons, Domain Walls, and Large N
We consider the de Sitter cosmology deformed by the presence of a thermal bath of radiation and/or time-dependent moduli fields. Depending on the parameters, either a first or second order phase transition can occur. In the first case, an…
This is the first in a series of papers which ultimately aims on improving on the present estimates on the axion mass by modeling the topological non-perturbative QCD dynamics. Axions couple to instantons and their mass is set by the…
We discuss a novel scenario for early cosmology, when the inflationary quasi-de Sitter phase dynamically originates from the initial quantum state represented by the microcanonical density matrix. This genuine quantum effect occurs as a…
Paradigm shift in gauge topology at finite temperatures, from the instantons to their constituents -- instanton-dyons -- has recently lead to studies of their ensembles and very significant advances. Like instantons, they have fermionic…
We investigate superfluid phase transitions of asymmetric nuclear matter at finite temperature ($T$) and density ($\rho$) with a low proton fraction ($Y_{\rm p} \le 0.2$) which is relevant to the inner crust and outer core of neutron stars.…
We explore the stability of certain many-body quantum states which may exist at zero or finite temperatures, may lack long-range order and even topological order, and still are thermodynamically distinct from uncorrelated disordered phases.…
We describe a new family of thin-wall instantons, with negative tension bubble walls, that mediate tunneling between Minkowski or de Sitter vacua. Some of these instantons can have exponentially enhanced tunneling rates, and would dominate…
We study different scenarios of topological phase transitions in the vicinity of the \pi^0 condensation point in neutron matter. The transitions occur between the Fermi-liquid state and a topologically different one with two sheets of the…
We show that instanton calculations in QCD become theoretically well defined in the gluon saturation environment which suppresses large size instantons. The effective cutoff scale is determined by the inverse of the saturation scale. We…
It has been remarked in several previous works that the combination of center vortices and nexuses (a nexus is a monopole-like soliton whose world line mediates certain allowed changes of field strengths on vortex surfaces) carry…
Using the 1/N expansion, we study the influence of quantum instantons on the thermodynamics of the CP^(N-1) model in 1+1 dimensions. We do this by calculating the pressure to next-to-leading order in 1/N, without quantum instanton…
While sign-coherent 4-dimensional structures cannot dominate topological charge fluctuations in the QCD vacuum at all scales due to reflection positivity, it is possible that enhanced coherence exists over extended space-time regions of…
We report results of fully non-perturbative, Path Integral Monte Carlo (PIMC) calculations for dilute neutron matter. The neutron-neutron interaction in the s channel is parameterized by the scattering length and the effective range. We…
To elucidate the role played by instantons in chiral symmetry breaking, we explore their properties in full QCD, around the critical temperature. We study in particular spatial correlations between low-lying Dirac eigenmodes and instantons.…
A solution to the classical field equations in the massless (1+1)-dimensional O(3) sigma model is found, which describes a multi-particle instanton-like transition at high energy. In the limit of small number of initial particles, the…
We investigate a new mechanism for the cosmological QCD phase transition: inhomogeneous nucleation. The primordial temperature fluctuations, measured to be $\delta T/T \sim 10^{-5}$, are larger than the tiny temperature interval, in which…
We propose a scenario for bottom-up gravity dual picture of QCD-like theories, which consists of two near-AdS$_5$ domains separated by the ``domain wall'' at which the effective coupling relatively rapidly switches from small perturbative…
Using the gradient flow, we calculated the nucleon mixing angle $\alpha_{N}$ and the nucleon electric dipole moment (EDM) induced by the QCD $\theta$-term. To do so, we computed the topological charge, and the nucleon two-point and…
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…
We derive the $\sigma$-model for granular metals. It is valid for any relation between the temperature, $T$, and the grain mean level spacing. The continuum limit of the $\sigma$-model describes non-perturbative charging effects in…