The ground state of low-energy QCD matter in strong magnetic fields is either a chiral soliton lattice (CSL), a periodic array of neutral pion domain walls (chiral solitons) perpendicular to the magnetic field, or domain-wall Skyrmion phase, in which Skyrmions are induced on top of the CSL. Previously found domain-wall Skyrmions are bosons with the baryon number two. In this paper, we show that the minimum domain-wall Skyrmions are fermions with baryon number one; a bosonic domain-wall Skyrmion can be separated without energy cost into two fermionic domain-wall Skyrmions attached on the opposite sides of a chiral soliton. The phase boundary between the CSL and domain-wall Skyrmion phases is unchanged. In the chiral limit, the CSL reduces to a linearly dependent neutral pion on the direction of the magnetic field, while fermionic domain-wall Skyrmions sit in an equal distance of half a period.

Japan

Patrick Copinger

Minoru Eto

Muneto Nitta

Zebin Qiu

Fermionic domain-wall Skyrmions of QCD in a magnetic field

We investigate the chiral soliton lattice (CSL) in the framework of holographic QCD in magnetic field. Under appropriate boundary conditions for the gauge field and the quark mass deformation, we demonstrate that the ground state in the gravitational dual of QCD is given by the CSL in the background magnetic field and the baryon number density. In the presence of the background magnetic field, we show that the CSL is interpreted as a uniformly distributed D4-branes in the holographic setup, where the chiral soliton is identified with a non-self-dual instanton vortex or a center vortex in the five dimensional bulk gauge theory. While the baryon numbers are given to chiral solitons as well as Skyrmions due to the different terms in the Wess-Zumino-Witten (WZW) term in the chiral perturbation theory, these baryon numbers with different origins are unified in terms of the instanton charge density in five dimensions. With bulk analysis of the WZW term, we find that the pion decay constant becomes dependent on the magnetic field. For the massless pion case, we obtain an analytical form that is in qualitative agreement with lattice QCD results for strong magnetic fields.

Markus Amano

Shin Sasaki

Holographic QCD matter: chiral soliton lattices in strong magnetic field

Dislocations, as topological defects in crystal lattices, are fundamental to understanding plasticity in materials. Similar periodic structures also arise in continuum field theories, such as chiral soliton lattices (CSLs), which appear in condensed matter systems like chiral magnets and in high-energy contexts such as quantum chromodynamics in strong magnetic field or under rapid rotation. This work investigates whether dislocations can dynamically form within such emergent CSLs. The chiral sine-Gordon model, reduced from the aforementioned examples by certain truncations, is useful to determine the ground state but it cannot describe time evolution, lacks dynamical formation or leads to singular dislocations, because its equations of motion do not contain a topological term. We propose a field-theoretical model including the topological term coupled to external fields resolving these issues by modifying the topological term so it affects the dynamics. Using numerical simulations, we study the real-time formation of CSLs in two and three spatial dimensions. In 2D, edge dislocations emerge spontaneously, guiding soliton growth and later annihilating to leave a stable CSL. In 3D, both edge and screw dislocations form; the latter exhibits helical structure influenced by the external field. We find stable double helical screw dislocations looking like a double helix staircase or DNA. We then demonstrate the formation of helical dislocations and analyze how the external field strength affects CSL density and formation speed. Our results provide a novel theoretical framework for understanding dislocations in solitonic structures, connecting high-energy field theory with materials science phenomena.

Kentaro Nishimura

Dislocations and crystallization dynamics of chiral soliton lattices

Fermion zero modes of Bogomol’nyi-Prasad-Sommerfield monopole-string-domain wall composites in three spatial dimensions are studied. We analytically solve the Dirac equation and prove the existence of one fermion zero mode. Depending on mass parameters of bosons/fermions in the model, the zero modes are localized either on the monopoles, strings or domain walls, which we call monopole-string-domain wall fermions. We also show that in special cases, the zero modes can be confined within a finite vacuum region in the shape of an arbitrary convex polyhedron, which we call the polyhedral vacuum fermions. Furthermore, we show that fermionic superconducting currents do not generally flow on the host solitons except for the cases that the soliton network consists only of strings and domain walls and has translational symmetry about a spatial axis.

Yuito Suzuki

Massless monopole-string-domain wall fermions and polyhedral vacuum fermions

<p>Knots emerge in various fields of mathematics and physics today. We show that knots indeed appear as stable solitons in a realistic extension of the standard model of particle physics that provides the QCD axion and right-handed neutrinos. This result suggests that, during the early Universe, a “knot dominated era” may have existed, where knots were a dominant component of the Universe, and this scenario can be tested through gravitational wave observations. Furthermore, we propose that the end of this era involves the collapse of the knots via quantum tunneling, leading to the generation of matter-antimatter asymmetry in the Universe.</p>

Germany

Yu Hamada

Tying Knots in Particle Physics

<p>Low-energy dynamics of QCD can be described by pion degrees of freedom in terms of the chiral perturbation theory. A chiral soliton lattice, an array of solitons, is the ground state due to the chiral anomaly in the presence of a magnetic field larger than a certain critical value at finite density. Here, we show in a model-independent and fully analytic manner (at the leading order of the chiral perturbation theory) that the chiral soliton lattice phase transits to a “domain-wall skyrmion phase” when the chemical potential is larger than the critical value <math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><mrow><msub><mrow><mi>μ</mi></mrow><mrow><mi mathvariant="normal">c</mi></mrow></msub><mo>=</mo><mn>16</mn><mi>π</mi><msubsup><mrow><mi>f</mi></mrow><mrow><mi>π</mi></mrow><mrow><mn>2</mn></mrow></msubsup><mo>/</mo><mn>3</mn><msub><mrow><mi>m</mi></mrow><mrow><mi>π</mi></mrow></msub><mo>∼</mo><mn>1.03</mn><mtext> </mtext><mtext> </mtext><mi>GeV</mi></mrow></math> with the pion’s decay constant <math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><msub><mi>f</mi><mi>π</mi></msub></math> and mass <math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><msub><mi>m</mi><mi>π</mi></msub></math>, which can be regarded as the nuclear saturation density. There spontaneously appear stable two-dimensional skyrmions or lumps on a soliton surface, which can be viewed as three-dimensional skyrmions carrying even baryon numbers from the bulk. They behave as superconducting rings with persistent currents due to a charged pion condensation. This phase is in scope of future heavy-ion collider experiments.</p>

Domain-Wall Skyrmion Phase in Dense QCD at Strong Magnetic Fields Using Leading-Order Chiral Perturbation Theory

The ground state of QCD in sufficiently strong magnetic field at finite baryon density is an inhomogeneous state consisting of an array of solitons, called the chiral soliton lattice (CSL). It is, however, replaced in a region with higher density and/or magnetic field by the so-called domain-wall Skyrmion (DWSk) phase where Skyrmions are created on top of the CSL. This was previously proposed within the Bogomol’nyi-Prasad-Sommerfield (BPS) approximation neglecting a gauge field dynamics and taking into account its effect by a flux quantization condition. In this paper, by taking into account dynamics of the gauge field, we show that the phase boundary between the CSL and DWSk phases beyond the BPS approximation is identical to the one obtained in the BPS approximation. We also find that domain-wall Skyrmions are electrically charged with the charge one as a result of the chiral anomaly.

Yuki Amari

Domain-wall Skyrmion phase of QCD in magnetic field: gauge field dynamics

We study topological lumps supported by the second homotopy group $\textit{π}$ ($\textit{S}$ ) ⋍ $\textit{ℤ}$ in a gauged $\textit{O}$(3) model without any potential term coupled with a (non)dynamical U(1) gauge field. It is known that gauged-lumps are stable with an easy-plane potential term but are unstable to expand if the model has no potential term. In this paper, we find that these gauged lumps without a potential term can be made stable by putting them in a uniform magnetic field, irrespective of whether the gauge field is dynamical or not. In the case of the non-dynamical gauge field, only either of lumps or anti-lumps stably exists depending on the sign of the background magnetic field, and the other is unstable to shrink to be singular. We also construct coaxial multiple lumps whose size and mass exhibit a behaviour of droplets. In the case of the dynamical gauge field, both the lumps and anti-lumps stably exist with different masses; the lighter (heavier) one corresponds to the (un)stable one in the case of the nondynamical gauge field. We find that a lump behaves as a superconducting ring and traps magnetic field in its inside, with the total magnetic field reduced from the background magnetic field.

Topological solitons stabilized by a background gauge field and soliton-anti-soliton asymmetry

We examine neutrino zeromode solutions on the electroweak Z-string and their effect on the stability of the string in the standard model and its extensions. We propose using topological invariants constructed from the momentum (and real) space topology of Green’s functions, often used for investigating edge modes in condensed matter physics. We analyze the standard model and then examine type-I and type-II extensions of the neutrino sector as well as their hybrid. Based on this analysis, we also comment on proposals in the literature to stabilize the Z-string.

Ryusuke Jinno

China

Masatoshi Yamada

Neutrino zeromodes on electroweak strings in light of topological insulators

The ground state of QCD with two flavors at a finite baryon chemical potential under rapid rotation is a chiral soliton lattice (CSL) of the η meson, consisting of a stack of sine-Gordon solitons carrying a baryon number, due to the anomalous coupling of the η meson to the rotation. In a large parameter region, the ground state becomes a non-Abelian CSL, in which due to the neutral pion condensation each η soliton decays into a pair of non-Abelian sine-Gordon solitons carrying S 2 moduli originated from Nambu-Goldstone (NG) modes localized around it, corresponding to the spontaneously broken vector symmetry SU(2)V. There, the S 2 modes of neighboring solitons are anti-aligned, and these modes should propagate in the transverse direction of the lattice due to the interaction between the S 2 modes of neighboring solitons. In this paper, we calculate excitations including gapless NG modes and excited modes around non-Abelian and Abelian (η) CSLs, and find three gapless NG modes with linear dispersion relations (type-A NG modes): two isospinons (S 2 modes) and a phonon corresponding to the spontaneously broken vector SU(2)V and translational symmetries around the non-Abelian CSL, respectively, and only a phonon for the Abelian CSL because of the recovering SU(2)V. We also find in the deconfined phase that the dispersion relation of the isospinons becomes of the Dirac type, i.e. linear even at large momentum.