Free caloron gas in high temperature quenched QCD

Understand

Across the finite temperature transition to the quark-gluon plasma, the QCD topological susceptibility decreases sharply.

• Thus in the high temperature phase the remaining topological objects (possibly calorons) form a weakly interacting dilute gas.
• The overlap Dirac operator, through its exact zero modes, allows one to measure the net topological charge.
• We show that separately the number of positively and negatively charged topological objects can also be extracted from the low end of the overlap Dirac spectrum.