@article{ab9f0671ef2f481e807e70c5da65e85b,
title = "Phase transitions in QCD as tunneling through singular barriers",
abstract = "We show that the phase transitions of QCD, chiral symmetry breaking and confinement, can be interpreted physically as tunneling through (infrared) singular barriers. The appearance of monopoles in QCD and the properties of massless fermions in a meron field are discussed in the context of this interpretation.",
author = "Callan, {Curtis Gove} and R. Dashen and D. Gross",
note = "Funding Information: Between perturbation theoretic QCD and real hadrons lie two phase transitions, confinement and chiral symmetry breaking. In this paper we give a simple interpretation of these phase transitions in terms of tunneling through singular barriers. The observation that the BPST instanton \[1\] represented quantum mechanical tunneling \[2\] between classical vacua was useful in that it gave the instanton a home in the usual conceptual framework of quantum mechanics. Our purpose here is to do the same thing for some more complex phenomena. One must remember however that a simple tunneling picture has problems in field theory. In QCD tunnelings are localized in space as well as time and it is difficult to say whether or not a specific tunneling transition has actually taken place, since it might have been accompanied by a distant anti-tunneling. A framework which avoids this difficulty is the analog gas picture \[3\] where the tunnelings are thought of as (pseudo-)particles in a four dimensional gas. We will need only one concept from this gas picture, the entropy of a configuration. It is the log of the volume in function space occupied by 1 Research supported in part by National Science Foundation Grant No. PHY 78-01221. Funding Information: 2 Research supported in part by Department of Energy Grant No. EY-76-S-02-2220. Funding Information: 3 On leave from Princeton University. Research supported in part by National Science Foundation Grant No. PHY 77-20612. Copyright: Copyright 2014 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.",
year = "1978",
month = aug,
day = "14",
doi = "10.1016/0370-2693(78)90704-9",
language = "English (US)",
volume = "77",
pages = "270--274",
journal = "Physics Letters B",
issn = "0370-2693",
publisher = "Elsevier B.V.",
number = "3",
}