Color Anomaly and Flavor-Singlet Axial Charge of the Proton in the Chiral Bag: The Cheshire Cat Revisited

Abstract

Quantum effects inside the chiral bag induce a color anomaly which requires a compensating surface term to prevent breakdown of color gauge invariance. We show that the presence of this surface term first discovered several years ago allows one to derive in a gauge-invariant way a chiral-bag version of the Shore-Veneziano two-component formula for the flavor-singlet axial charge of the proton. This has relevance to what is referred to as the ``proton spin problem" on the one hand and to the Cheshire-Cat phenomenon in hadron structure on the other. We show that when calculated to the leading order in the color gauge coupling and for a specific color electric monopole configuration in the bag, one can obtain a striking Cheshire-Cat phenomenon with a negligibly small singlet axial charge.