The axial anomaly in QCD at finite temperature

Abstract

We study flavor mixing and the axial anomaly in QCD at zero and finite temperature. Using the instanton liquid model, we show that the strength of the anomaly is essentially unchanged near the critical temperature for chiral symmetry restoration. We demonstrate that nevertheless, chiral symmetry restoration has important consequences for the eta and eta prime. In particular, the strange and non-strange components of the eta unmix near T_c. The anomaly does not affect the strange eta, so we expect a light purely strange pseudoscalar meson near the phase transition.