TL;DR
This paper reviews the role of topological objects such as monopoles, instantons, and calorons in explaining nonperturbative phenomena in QCD, combining formal theory and lattice results.
Contribution
It provides a comprehensive overview of topological excitations in QCD, including formal treatments, applications, and recent lattice findings.
Findings
Topological objects are key to understanding confinement in QCD.
Calorons and monopoles have significant roles in nonperturbative effects.
Lattice results support the importance of topological excitations.
Abstract
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.
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.