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Topological insulators are substances which are bulk insulators but which carry current via special "topologically protected" edge states. The understanding of long range topological order in these systems is built around the idea of a Berry connection, which is a gauge connection obtained from the phase of the electron wave function transported over momentum space rather than coordinate space. The phase of a closed Wilson loop of the Berry connection around the Brillouin zone defines a topological order parameter which labels discrete flux vacua. The conducting states are surface modes on the domain walls between discrete vacua. Evidence from large-$N_c$ chiral dynamics, holographic QCD, and Monte Carlo observations has pointed to a picture of the QCD vacuum that is very similar to that of a topological insulator, with discrete quasivacua labelled by $\theta$ angles that differ by mod $2\pi$. In this picture, the domain walls are membranes of Chern-Simons charge, and the quark condensate consists of surface modes on these membranes, which are delocalized and thus support the long range propagation of Goldstone pions. The Berry phase in QED2 describes charge polarization of fermion-antifermion pairs, while in 4D QCD it describes the polarization of Chern-Simons membranes., Comment: 7 pages, no figures, talk presented at Lattice 2014

The dynamical effects of topological charge in two-dimensional QED can be expressed in terms of a topological order parameter via a Berry phase construction. The Berry phase describes the electric charge polarization of the vacuum in a manner similar to the theory of polarization in topological insulators. The topological order parameter labels discrete vacua which differ by units of electric flux. Here the associated Berry connection is explicitly constructed from the Dirac Hamiltonian eigenstates by introducing a small attractive Thirring coupling, so that there is still a stable boson in the limit of zero EM coupling. The Berry connection arises from the analytic structure of the Bethe ansatz states in complex rapidity near the free fermion point., Comment: 16 pages, 3 figures

There is considerable evidence, based on large $N_c$ chiral dynamics, holographic QCD, and Monte Carlo studies, that the QCD vacuum is permeated by discrete quasivacua separated by domain walls across which the local value of the topological $\theta$ parameter jumps by $\pm2\pi$. In the 2-dimensional $CP^{N-1}$ sigma model, a pointlike charge is a domain wall, and $\theta$ describes the background electric flux and the polarization of charged pairs in the vacuum. We show that the screening process, and the role of $\theta$ as an order parameter describing electric polarization, are naturally formulated in terms of Bloch wave eigenstates of the Dirac Hamiltonian in the background gauge field. This formulation is similar to the Berry phase description of electric polarization and quantized charge transport in topological insulators. The Bloch waves are quasiperiodic superpositions of localized Dirac zero modes. They define a Berry connection around the Brillouin zone of the zero mode band which describes the local polarization of vacuum pairs, analogous to its role in topological insulator theory. In 4D Yang-Mills theory, the $\theta$ domain walls are 2+1-dimensional Chern-Simons membranes. The interpretation of the $\theta$ parameter as a Berry phase describing the local polarization of brane-antibrane pairs follows from the descent equations of 4D Yang-Mills theory., Comment: 18 pages, 2 figures

Both theoretical arguments and Monte Carlo observations indicate that the topological structure of the QCD vacuum consists of a laminated array of extended, coherent codimension-one membranes of alternating sign. Large-$N_c$ arguments, supported by gauge/string holography, indicate that these membranes are domain walls which separate discrete "flux vacua" with values of the topological $\theta$ parameter which differ by $\pm 2\pi$. This exposes a close analogy with 2D U(1) gauge theory, where $\theta$ can be interpreted as electric polarization, and the domain walls are pointlike charged particles. In 4D QCD, the $\theta$ parameter represents background Ramond-Ramond flux, which can be interpreted as a polarization of the charged membranes in the vacuum. In this framework, the chiral condensate is formed from the quark surface modes on the membranes. Massless Goldstone boson propagation takes place due to a coordination between bulk oscillations of the polarization field $\theta$ and the surface currents represented by the Chern-Simons 3-form on the brane surface. This coordination is enforced by overall gauge invariance which imposes an anomaly inflow constraint between bulk and surface currents., Comment: 6 pages, Talk presented at Chiral Dynamics Workshop, Jefferson Lab, Aug. 2012

We study the membrane-like structure of topological charge density and its fluctuations in the QCD vacuum. Quark zero modes are localized on the membranes and the resultant gauge anomaly is cancelled by the gauge variation of a Chern-Simons type effective action in the bulk via the anomaly inflow mechanism. The coupling between brane fluctuations, described by the rotations of its normal vector, and the Chern-Simons current provides the needed anomaly inflow to the membrane. This coupling is also related to the axial U(1) anomaly which can induce brane punctures, and consequently quark-antiquark annihilation across the brane. As the Chern-Simons current has a long-range character, together with membranes it might lead to a solution to the confinement problem., Comment: 8 pages, no figure, Xth Conference on Quark Confinement and the Hadron Spectrum

Large $N_c$ and holographic arguments, as well as Monte Carlo results, suggest that the topological structure of the QCD vacuum is dominated by codimension-one membranes which appear as thin dipole layers of topological charge. Such membranes arise naturally as $D6$ branes in the holographic formulation of QCD based on IIA string theory. The polarizability of these membranes leads to a vacuum energy $\propto \theta^2$, providing the origin of nonzero topological susceptibility. Here we show that the axial U(1) anomaly can be formulated as anomaly inflow on the brane surfaces. A 4D gauge transformation at the brane surface separates into a 3D gauge transformation of components within the brane and the transformation of the transverse component. The in-brane gauge transformation induces currents of an effective Chern-Simons theory on the brane surface, while the transformation of the transverse component describes the transverse motion of the brane and is related to the Ramond-Ramond closed string field in the holographic formulation of QCD. The relation between the surface currents and the transverse motion of the brane is dictated by the descent equations of Yang-Mills theory., Comment: 22 pages, 3 figures

Topological excitations in the QCD vacuum take the form of coherent codimension one sheets with positive and negative sheets juxtaposed in a dipole layer. These sheets may be interpreted as Luscher's "Wilson bags," which are domain walls between discrete quasivacua labelled by a local value of the $\theta$ parameter equal to $2\pi k$, with $k$ given by the number of units of background Ramond-Ramond flux. This picture of the vacuum is closely analogous to Coleman's description of the 2D massive Schwinger model, where $\theta$ is interpreted as a background electric field, and a pointlike charged particle is a domain wall between vacua which differ by one unit of background electric flux. The main effect of the Ramond-Ramond U(1) field in low energy QCD dynamics is the generation of phenomenologically important contact terms: (1) The dominant contact term in the topological charge correlator which leads to positive topological susceptibility, (2) The $\eta'$ mass insertion, and (3) An $SU(N_f)\times SU(N_f)$ invariant Nambu-Jona Lasinio 4-quark interaction., Comment: 7 pages, 1 figure, talk presented at Lattice 2011, Lake Tahoe, CA

The Witten-Sakai-Sugimoto construction of holographic QCD in terms of D4 color branes and D8 flavor branes in type IIA string theory is used to investigate the role of topological charge in the chiral dynamics of quarks in QCD. The QCD theta term arises from a compactified 5-dimensional Chern-Simons term on the D4 branes. This term couples the QCD topological charge to the Ramond-Ramond $U(1)$ gauge field of IIA string theory. The nonzero topological susceptibility of pure-glue QCD can be attributed to the presence of D6 branes, which constitute magnetic sources of the RR gauge field. The topological charge of QCD is required, by an anomaly inflow argument, to coincide in space-time with the intersection of the D6 branes and the D4 color branes. This clarifies the relation between D6 branes and the coherent, codimension-one topological charge membranes observed in QCD Monte Carlo calculations. Using open-string/closed-string duality, we interpret a quark loop (represented by a D4-D8 open string loop) in terms of closed-string exchange between color and flavor branes. The role of the RR gauge field in quark-antiquark annihilation processes is discussed. RR exchange in the s-channel generates a 4-quark contact term which produces an $\eta'$ mass insertion and provides an explanation for the observed spin-parity structure of the OZI rule. The $(\log {\rm Det\;U})^2$ form of the $U(1)$ anomaly emerges naturally. RR exchange in the t-channel of the $q\overline{q}$ scattering amplitude produces a Nambu-Jona Lasinio interaction which may provide a mechanism for spontaneous breaking of $SU(N_f)\times SU(N_f)$., Comment: 20 pages, 7 figures

Lattice Monte Carlo studies in SU(3) gauge theory have shown that the topological charge distribution in the vacuum is dominated by thin coherent membranes of codimension one arranged in a layered, alternating-sign sandwich. A similar lamination of topological charge occurs in the 2D $CP^{N-1}$ model. In holographic QCD, the observed topological charge sheets are naturally interpreted as $D6$ branes wrapped around an $S_4$.. With this interpretation, the laminated array of topological charge membranes observed on the lattice can be identified as a "tachyonic crystal", a regular, alternating-sign array of $D6$ and $\bar{D6}$ branes that arises as the final state of the decay of a non-BPS $D7$ brane via the tachyonic mode of the attached string. In the gauge theory, the homogeneous, space-filling $D7$ brane represents the perturbative gauge vacuum, which is unstable toward lamination associated with a marginal tachyonic boundary perturbation $\propto \cos(X/\sqrt{2\alpha'})$. For the $CP^{N-1}$ model, the cutoff field theory can be cast as the low energy limit of an open string theory in background gauge and tachyon fields $A_{\mu}(x)$ and $\lambda(x)$. This allows a detailed comparison with large $N$ field theory results and provides strong support for the tachyonic crystal interpretation of the gauge theory vacuum., Comment: 21 pages, 3 figures

The large-$N_c$ orientifold planar equivalence between $\mathcal{N}=1$ SUSY Yang-Mills theory and ordinary 1-flavor QCD suggests that low-energy quark-gluon dynamics in QCD should be constrained by the supersymmetry of the parent theory. One SUSY relic expected from orientifold equivalence is the approximate degeneracy of the scalar and pseudoscalar mesons in 1-flavor QCD. Here we study the role of the $q\bar{q}$ annihilation (hairpin) contributions to the meson correlators. These annihilation terms induce mass shifts of opposite sign in the scalar and pseudoscalar channels, making degeneracy plausible. Calculations of valence and hairpin correlators in quenched lattice QCD are consistent with approximate degeneracy, although the errors on the scalar hairpin are large. We also study the role of $q\bar{q}$ annihilation in the 1- and 2-flavor Nambu-Jona Lasinio model, where annihilation terms arise from the chiral field determinant representing the axial U(1) anomaly. Scalar-pseudoscalar degeneracy for the 1-flavor case reduces to a constraint on the relative size of the anomalous and non-anomalous 4-fermion couplings., Comment: 17 pages, 3 figures

Monte Carlo studies of pure glue SU(3) gauge theory using the overlap-based topological charge operator have revealed a laminar structure in the QCD vacuum consisting of extended, thin, coherent, locally 3-dimensional sheets of topological charge embedded in 4D space, with opposite sign sheets interleaved. In this talk I discuss the interpretation of these Monte Carlo results in terms of our current theoretical understanding of theta-dependence and topological structure in asymptotically free gauge theories., Comment: Talk presented at the 7th Conference on Quark Confinement and the Hadron Spectrum, Ponta Delgada, Azores, Sept. 2-7, 2006

In an effort to clarify the significance of the recent observation of long-range topological charge coherence in QCD gauge configurations, we study the local topological charge distributions in two-dimensional $CP^{N-1}$ sigma models, using the overlap Dirac operator to construct the lattice topological charge. We find long-range sign coherence of topological charge along extended one-dimensional structures in two-dimensional spacetime. We discuss the connection between the long range topological structure found in $CP^{N-1}$ and the observed sign coherence along three-dimensional sheets in four-dimensional QCD gauge configurations. In both cases, coherent regions of topological charge form along membrane-like surfaces of codimension one. We show that the Monte Carlo results, for both two-dimensional and four-dimensional gauge theory, support a view of topological charge fluctuations suggested by Luscher and Witten. In this framework, the observed membranes are associated with boundaries between ``k-vacua,'' characterized by an effective local value of $\theta$ which jumps by $\pm 2\pi$ across the boundary., Comment: 26 pages

The recently observed long-range coherent structure of topological charge fluctuations in QCD is compared with theoretical expectations based on the AdS/CFT brane construction of nonsupersymmetric gauge theory by Witten. Similar observations of coherent topologicalcharge structure in 2D $CP^{N-1}$ sigma models are interpreted in terms of Wilson lines representing world lines of screened electric charges. The analogy between 2D U(1) and 4D Yang-Mills theory leads to the interpretation of the observed coherent sheets of topological charge in QCD as screened ``Wilson bags'' first suggested by Luscher. The duality between the Wilson bag surface and a wrapped 6-brane in IIA string theory is discussed. The complete screening of the force between bag surfaces for integer values of the bag charge $\theta/2\pi$ corresponds to the observation by Polchinski that the net force between d-branes from closed string exchange vanishes for quantized values of Ramond-Ramond charge., Comment: Talk presented at Lattice 2005

While sign-coherent 4-dimensional structures cannot dominate topological charge fluctuations in the QCD vacuum at all scales due to reflection positivity, it is possible that enhanced coherence exists over extended space-time regions of lower dimension. Using the overlap Dirac operator to calculate topological charge density, we present evidence for such structure in pure-glue SU(3) lattice gauge theory. It is found that a typical equilibrium configuration is dominated by two oppositely-charged sign-coherent connected structures (``sheets'') covering about 80% of space-time. Each sheet is built from elementary 3-d cubes connected through 2-d faces, and approximates a low-dimensional curved manifold (or possibly a fractal structure) embedded in the 4-d space. At the heart of the sheet is a ``skeleton'' formed by about 18% of the most intense space-time points organized into a global long-range structure, involving connected parts spreading over maximal possible distances. We find that the skeleton is locally 1-dimensional and propose that its geometrical properties might be relevant for understanding the possible role of topological charge fluctuations in the physics of chiral symmetry breaking., Comment: 4 pages RevTeX, 4 figures; v2: 6 pages, 5 figures, more explanations provided, figure and references added, published version

We consider the lattice topological charge density introduced by Hasenfratz, Laliena and Niedermayer and propose its eigenmode expansion as a tool to investigate the structure of topological charge fluctuations in QCD. The resulting effective density is built from local chiralities studied previously. At every order of the expansion the density exactly sums up to the global topological charge, and the leading term describes the maximally smooth space-time distribution of charge relevant for propagating light fermions. We use this framework to demonstrate our previous suggestion that the bulk of topological charge in QCD does not effectively appear in the form of quantized unit lumps. Our conclusion implies that it is unlikely that the mixing of "would-be" zeromodes associated with such lumps is the prevalent microscopic mechanism for spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking in QCD. We also present first results quantitatively characterizing the space-time behavior of effective densities. For coherent fluctuations contained in spherical regions we find a continuous distribution of associated charges essentially ending at ~0.5., Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, RevTex; v2: typo in eq. (3) fixed; v3: References added, minor cosmetic changes, unchanged conclusions, published version

The reasons for using low-lying Dirac eigenmodes to probe the local structure of topological charge fluctuations in QCD are discussed, and it is pointed out that the qualitative double-peaked behavior of the local chiral orientation probability distribution in these modes is necessary, but not sufficient for dominance of instanton-like fluctuations. The results with overlap Dirac operator in Wilson gauge backgrounds at lattice spacings ranging from a~0.04 fm to a~0.12 fm are reported, and it is found that the size and density of local structures responsible for double-peaking of the distribution are in disagreement with the assumptions of the Instanton Liquid Model. More generally, our results suggest that vacuum fluctuations of topological charge are not effectively dominated by locally quantized (integer-valued) lumps in QCD., Comment: 29 pages, 13 figures; v2: minor improvements in presentation, results and conclusions unchanged, version to appear in PRD

The low-lying eigenmodes of the Dirac operator associated with typical gauge field configurations in QCD encode, among other low-energy properties, the physics behind the solution to the $U_A(1)$ problem (i.e. the origin of the $\eta'$ mass), the nature of spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking, and the physics of string-breaking, quark-antiquark pair production, and the OZI rule. Moreover, the space-time chiral structure of these eigenmodes reflects the space-time topological structure of the underlying gauge field. We present evidence from lattice QCD on the local chiral structure of low Dirac eigenmodes leading to the conclusion that topological charge fluctuations of the QCD vacuum are not instanton-dominated. The result supports Witten's arguments that topological charge is produced by confinement-related gauge fluctuations rather than instantons., Comment: 35 pages, 11 figures

The generalization of Lorentz invariance to solvable two-dimensional lattice fermion models has been formulated in terms of Baxter's corner transfer matrix. In these models, the lattice Hamiltonian and boost operator are given by fermionized nearest-neighbor Heisenberg spin chain operators. The transformation properties of the local lattice fermion operators under a boost provide a natural and precise way of generalizing the chiral structure of a continuum Dirac field to the lattice. The resulting formulation differs from both the Wilson and staggered (Kogut-Susskind) prescriptions. In particular, an axial $Q_5$ rotation is sitewise local, while the vector charge rotation mixes nearest neighbors on even and odd sublattices., Comment: 3 pages, latex, no figures