MONOPOLES FROM QUARK CONDENSATES IN QCD

Abstract

Chiral monopoles are hedgehoglike structures in local chiral condensates in QCD. These monopoles are (i) made of quark and gluon fields; (ii) explicitly gauge-invariant; (iii) they carry quantized and conserved chromomagnetic charge. We argue that the chiral condensate vanishes in a core of the chiral monopole while the density of these monopoles increases with temperature wiping out the quark condensate in quark-gluon plasma. We suggest that the chiral monopoles are responsible for the chiral symmetry restoration in QCD. We also argue that the chiral monopoles are unlikely to be responsible for confinement of color. Thus, phenomena of the chiral symmetry restoration and the color deconfinement in QCD are not necessarily related to each other and the corresponding transitions may happen at different temperatures.