Deconfinement on ℤF and Axion Domain Walls
Abstract
We investigate the nontrivial dynamics on ℤF domain walls and compute their tension in quantum chromodynamics (QCD) compactified on a circle with N colors and F < N massless fundamental flavors. In the process, we obtain insights on the η' meson's potential in a regime where it is heavy and comparable in mass to other QCD resonances, as in Nature. We employ a center-stabilized compactification of QCD on a small circle of size L with color-flavor twisted boundary conditions for the quarks. We demonstrate that probe particles in color representations of N-ality N/gcd(N,F) are deconfined on the ℤF domain walls whenever N and F are not coprime. This is reminiscent of deconfinement on axion domain walls in pure Yang--Mills. Finally, in the double scaling limit N→ ∞ keeping NL and F fixed, the infrared spectrum spans an emergent dimension. We establish that the ℤF domain walls are dual to electrostatic charge distributions in this emergent dimension. This duality allows us to compute their tension analytically and find a different tension scaling at large-N between ℤF domain walls in QCD and axion domain walls in pure Yang--Mills, in center-stabilized compactifications.
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BibTeX
@misc{bilisco2026deconfinement,
title = {{Deconfinement on $\mathbbZ_F$ and Axion Domain Walls}},
author = {Paolo Bilisco and Raffaele Tito D'Agnolo and Arthur Platschorre and Pablo Sesma},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.27072},
eprint = {2610.27072},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27072},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Deconfinement on ℤ_F and Axion Domain Walls
AU - Paolo Bilisco
AU - Raffaele Tito D'Agnolo
AU - Arthur Platschorre
AU - Pablo Sesma
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/19
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.27072
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27072
AB - We investigate the nontrivial dynamics on ℤ_F domain walls and compute their tension in quantum chromodynamics (QCD) compactified on a circle with N colors and F < N massless fundamental flavors. In the process, we obtain insights on the η' meson's potential in a regime where it is heavy and comparable in mass to other QCD resonances, as in Nature. We employ a center-stabilized compactification of QCD on a small circle of size L with color-flavor twisted boundary conditions for the quarks. We demonstrate that probe particles in color representations of N-ality N/gcd(N,F) are deconfined on the ℤ_F domain walls whenever N and F are not coprime. This is reminiscent of deconfinement on axion domain walls in pure Yang--Mills. Finally, in the double scaling limit N→ ∞ keeping NL and F fixed, the infrared spectrum spans an emergent dimension. We establish that the ℤ_F domain walls are dual to electrostatic charge distributions in this emergent dimension. This duality allows us to compute their tension analytically and find a different tension scaling at large-N between ℤ_F domain walls in QCD and axion domain walls in pure Yang--Mills, in center-stabilized compactifications.
ER -