Constituent Quarks as Solitons

TL;DR

This paper presents soliton solutions in two-dimensional QCD that model constituent quarks, highlighting their dependence on quark mass and temperature, and their connection to confinement and phase transition phenomena.

Contribution

It introduces soliton solutions with quark quantum numbers in 2D QCD, revealing their existence conditions and behavior near the phase transition.

Findings

Quark solitons exist only for sufficiently heavy quarks.

They have infinite energy due to color flux at infinity.

Solitons disappear at the quark/hadron phase transition temperature.

Abstract

We exhibit soliton solutions of QCD in two dimensions that have the quantum numbers of quarks. They exist only for quarks heavier than the dimensional gauge coupling, and have infinite energy, corresponding to the presence of a string carrying the non-singlet color flux off to spatial infinity. The quark solitons also disappear at finite temperature, as the temperature-dependent effective quark mass is reduced in the approach to the quark/hadron phase transition.