D-branes and Topological Charge in QCD
Abstract
The recently observed long-range coherent structure of topological charge fluctuations in QCD is compared with theoretical expectations based on the AdS/CFT brane construction of nonsupersymmetric gauge theory by Witten. Similar observations of coherent topologicalcharge structure in 2D CPN-1 sigma models are interpreted in terms of Wilson lines representing world lines of screened electric charges. The analogy between 2D U(1) and 4D Yang-Mills theory leads to the interpretation of the observed coherent sheets of topological charge in QCD as screened ``Wilson bags'' first suggested by Luscher. The duality between the Wilson bag surface and a wrapped 6-brane in IIA string theory is discussed. The complete screening of the force between bag surfaces for integer values of the bag charge θ/2π corresponds to the observation by Polchinski that the net force between d-branes from closed string exchange vanishes for quantized values of Ramond-Ramond charge.
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