Spin statistics and surgeries of topological solitons in QCD matter in magnetic field

Abstract

The ground state of QCD with two flavors (up and down quarks) at finite baryon density in sufficiently strong magnetic field is in a form of either a chiral soliton lattice(CSL), an array of solitons stacked along the magnetic field, or a domain-wall Skyrmion phase in which Skyrmions are spontaneously created on top of the CSL. In the latter, one 2D (baby) Skyrmion in the chiral soliton corresponds to two 3D Skyrmions (baryons) in the bulk. In this paper, we study spin statistics of topological solitons by using the following two methods: the conventional Witten’s method by embedding the pion fields of two flavors into those of three flavors with the Wess-Zumino-Witten (WZW) term, and a more direct method by using the two-flavor WZW term written in terms of a spin structure. We find that a chiral soliton of finite quantized size called a pancake soliton and a hole on a chiral soliton are fermions or bosons depending on odd or even quantizations of their surface areas, respectively, and a domain-wall Skyrmion is a boson. We also propose surgeries of topological solitons: a domain-wall Skyrmion (boson) can be cut into a pancake soliton (fermion) and a hole (fermion), and a chiral soliton without Skyrmions can be cut into a pancake soliton (fermion) and a hole (fermion).