Yang-Mills streamlines and semi-classical confinement

TL;DR

This paper investigates semi-classical configurations in Yang-Mills theory derived from lattice simulations, revealing their role in confinement, chiral symmetry breaking, and topological charge structure, with detailed analysis of their space-time evolution.

Contribution

It introduces a constrained cooling technique that preserves Polyakov lines, enabling the study of semi-classical configurations' structure and their relation to confinement and topological features.

Findings

Semi-classical configurations sustain confinement.

Near-zero modes support chiral symmetry breaking.

Topological charge clusters differ from instanton models.

Abstract

Semi-classical configurations in Yang-Mills theory have been derived from lattice Monte Carlo configurations using a recently proposed constrained cooling technique which is designed to preserve every Polyakov line (at any point in space-time in any direction). Consequently, confinement was found sustained by the ensemble of semi-classical configurations. The existence of gluonic and fermionic near-to-zero modes was demonstrated as a precondition for a possible semi-classical expansion around the cooled configurations as well as providing the gapless spectrum of the Dirac operator necessary for chiral symmetry breaking. The cluster structure of topological charge of the semi-classical streamline configurations was analysed and shown to support the axial anomaly of the right size, although the structure differs from the instanton gas or liquid. Here, we present further details on the space-time structure and the time evolution of the streamline configurations.