Soft scalar-field corrections to the topological susceptibility

Abstract

We compute the contribution from soft scalar-field fluctuations to the topological susceptibility in SU(2) gauge theory at high temperature. We construct a 3-dimensional effective theory for the scalar field that accounts for the presence of an instanton. In the limit that the scalar selfcoupling $\lambda$ is much larger than the square of the gauge coupling $g$ we obtain a correction of order $\sqrt{\lambda }$ relative to the 1-loop result for the topological susceptibility.

arXiv comment20 pages, 1 figure