Monopoles from quark condensates in QCD

TL;DR

This paper introduces gauge-invariant chiral monopoles in QCD, proposing their role in chiral symmetry restoration at high temperatures, distinct from confinement phenomena.

Contribution

It presents a novel gauge-invariant monopole concept based on quark condensates and links their dynamics to chiral symmetry restoration in QCD.

Findings

Chiral monopoles are made of quark and gluon fields.

Their density increases with temperature, leading to chiral symmetry restoration.

Chiral monopoles are unlikely to be related to confinement.

Abstract

Chiral monopoles are hedgehoglike structures in local chiral condensates in QCD. These monopoles are (i) made of quark and gluon fields; (ii) explicitly gauge-invariant; and (iii) they carry quantized and conserved chromomagnetic charge. We argue that the chiral condensate vanishes in a core of the chiral monopole while the density of these monopoles increases with temperature wiping out the quark condensate in quark-gluon plasma. We suggest that the dynamics of the chiral monopoles is responsible for the chiral symmetry restoration in high temperature phase of QCD. We also argue that the chiral monopoles are unlikely to be associated with confining degrees of freedom. In our approach the chiral symmetry restoration and the color deconfinement in QCD are not necessarily related to each other and the corresponding transitions may occur at different temperatures.