Alladi Ramakrishnan Hall

The topological properties of QCD in and out-of equilibrium

Sayantan Sharma

Brookhaven National Laboratory, NY, USA

The topological property of strongly interacting matter
described by Quantum Chromodynamics is a subject of intense
research in the recent years. Very recently it has been
discovered that topological transitions in non-equilibrium QCD,
in presence of strong magnetic fields can give rise to novel
transport phenomena. In thermal QCD too there is an outstanding
problem to
understand whether the anomalous axial symmetry is effectively
restored at the chiral (crossover) transition temperature T_c,
since it is believed to influence the order of chiral phase
transition. I will discuss our recent results towards solving
this problem where we show using lattice gauge theory
techniques, that the anomalous axial symmetry is broken even at
1.5 T_c. The microscopic topological structures that are
responsible for this phenomenon are also investigated in great
detail. In the context of non-equilibrium QCD I will discuss the
recent progress we made in understanding the anomalous dynamics
of quarks in presence of topological transitions and magnetic
fields using lattice techniques. I will also briefly summarize
the possible applications of our real-time techniques beyond
QCD.