For an animation of the QCD vacuum revealing its topological structure, click on this
image
Caption: Isolated lumps (called instantons) are associated with a knotted-winding behavior in the gluon field. Just as water can swirl down a drain in clockwise and counter-clockwise directions, gluons can wind in positive (red to yellow shading) or negative (blue to green shading) directions.
Opposite windings next to each other can wipe each other out (annihilate). Watch the upper left corner! The short-lived instantons act to bind low-energy quarks to their locations. Quarks are thought to hop from instanton to instanton as they fluctuate in and out of the vacuum. It is this interaction between quarks and gluons that gives rise to the mass of protons and neutrons and thus most of the world around us.
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Current samples topics: