It isn't often that you see this many bold claims in a five page Letter. I think, for example, that this paper's conclusion implies that there is now no mechanism by which baryon number and lepton number violation can occur in the Standard Model. But this terse Letter could be more clear than it is on this point.
Also important is the fact that the analysis is done at the level of generality of nonabelian gauge theories generally, a category that includes not only QCD but also quantum gravity, potentially displacing roadblocks in theory development in that field.
We show that the topological charge of nonabelian gauge theory is unphysical by using the fact that it always involves the unphysical gauge field component proportional to the gradient of the gauge function. The removal of Gribov copies, which may break the Becchi-Rouet-Stora-Tyutin symmetry, is irrelevant thanks to the perturbative one-loop finiteness of the chiral anomaly. The unobservability of the topological charge immediately leads to the resolution of the Strong CP problem. We also present important consequences such as the physical relevance of axial U(1) symmetry, the θ-independence of vacuum energy, the unphysicalness of topological instantons, and the impossibilities of realizing the sphaleron induced baryogenesis as well as the chiral magnetic effect. The unphysical vacuum angle and the axial U(1) symmetry also imply that the CP phase of the Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa matrix is the sole source of CP violation of the standard model.
Nodoka Yamanaka, "Unobservability of topological charge in nonabelian gauge theory" arXiv:2212.10994 (December 21, 2022) (Letter. It will be followed by a full paper. Slides explaining graphically the discussion are given in this https URL).
"It isn't often that you see this many bold claims in a five page Letter."
ReplyDeleteWell, you see it quite often on vixra...
Full paper here. https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.11820
ReplyDeleteI think what's actually going on here, is the mathematical physics counterpart of someone falling for one of those simple but wrong "proofs" e.g. of Fermat's last theorem, and thereby declaring that all the later math was unnecessary.
ReplyDeleteIn this case, the author is revisiting some late 1970s discoveries (by people like 't Hooft) about the role of topology in quantum field theory, he convinces himself that these topological effects don't exist, and declares that all the work that's based on taking them into account is unnecessary.
I suspect the part where he goes wrong is in the vicinity of equation 8 ("the breakdown of BRST symmetry seems to falsify our assumption, but...").