Raymond and instantons: some recollections and the use of ADHM

Abstract

After the discovery of the BRST identities in 1974 Raymond spent some two years mostly on instantons. In those years we had a small group at the Centre Physique Théorique in Marseille discussing the physics and mathematics of instantons. The upshot of our discussions can be found in a set of lectures given by Raymond in Erice in 1977 and a year later in a Physics Reports volume. I present some recollections of that period; mostly how we were influenced by the twistor approach. I discuss the Atiyah-Drinfeld-Hitchin-Manin (ADHM) method to obtain instantons ("calorons") in thermal QCD following earlier work. The building blocks are a prepotential and a gauge invariant propagator. Then I will give surprisingly simple results in terms of these building blocks for the one loop vacuum response to a change in caloron parameters and some physical consequences for the effective action, in particular screening properties.

arXiv comment20 pages, two figures

References in corpus (8)

• Periodic Instantons with non-trivial Holonomy
• SU(2) Calorons and Magnetic Monopoles
• Monopole Constituents inside SU(n) Calorons
• Monopoles and Instantons on Partially Compactified D-Branes
• Exact T-duality between Calorons and Taub-NUT spaces
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• The thermal instanton determinant in compact form
• Caloron correction to the effective potential in thermal gluodynamics