Speaker
Description
Center vortices play a fundamental role in our understanding of the QCD vacuum, the mechanism of quark confinement, and dynamical chiral symmetry breaking. They are topological defects that form closed two-dimensional sheets that organise into highly intricate, foam-like structures. In this work, we use topological data analysis to study the structure of center vortices in dynamical lattice QCD. In particular, we use Betti numbers to study vortex sheet “percolation" and to characterise the size of its topological features and its embedding in spacetime. We focus on the geometric and topological changes that occur with temperature, particularly across two key temperatures, specifically the chiral temperature $T_c$ and the proposed deconfinement temperature $T_d$. We find that there are three distinct regimes: below $T_c$, between $T_c$ and $T_d$, and above $T_d$, where the geometry and topology exhibit qualitatively different behaviour.