Can Merons Describe Confinement?

TL;DR

This paper explores the potential of merons, topological solutions in Yang-Mills theory, as a mechanism for color confinement in QCD, using lattice techniques to identify and analyze these configurations.

Contribution

It introduces a method to study nonsingular meron solutions in lattice QCD and demonstrates how zero modes can identify these configurations in stochastic evaluations.

Findings

Merons can be extended to nonsingular solutions on the lattice.

Zero modes serve as indicators for meron configurations.

Lattice techniques can probe meron relevance to confinement.

Abstract

Merons, conjectured as a semiclassical mechanism for color confinement in QCD, are topological charge-1/2, singular solutions to the classical Yang-Mills equations of motion. I will discuss how lattice techniques can extend the study of merons to nonsingular stationary solutions without destroying properties believed to be essential for confinement, and how zero modes can be used to identify these gauge field configurations in stochastic evaluations of the lattice QCD path integral.