Domain Walls and Vortices in Chiral Symmetry Breaking

Abstract

We study domain walls and vortices in chiral symmetry breaking in a QCD-like theory with N flavors in the chiral limit. If the axial anomaly is absent, there exist stable Abelian axial vortices winding around the spontaneously broken U(1)_A symmetry and non-Abelian axial vortices winding around both the U(1)_A and non-Abelian SU(N) chiral symmetries. In the presence of the axial anomaly term, metastable domain walls are present and Abelian axial vortices must be attached by N domain walls, forming domain wall junctions. We show that a domain wall junction decays into N non-Abelian vortices attached by domain walls, implying its metastability. We also show that domain walls decay through the quantum tunneling by creating a hole bounded by a closed non-Abelian vortex.

21 pages, 6 figures, v2: published version