The topological objects near the chiral crossover transition in QCD

Understand

We study the underlying topology of gauge fields in 2+1 flavor QCD with domain wall fermions on lattices of size $32^3\times 8$, at and immediately above the chiral crossover transition.

• Using valence overlap fermions with exact index theorem, we focus on its zero modes for different choices of periodicity phases along the temporal direction.
• Our studies show that the zero modes are due to fractionally charged topological objects, the instanton-dyons.
• We further provide qualitative study of the interactions between those and compare with the available semi-classical results, finding remarkably accurate agreement in all cases.