The topological objects near the chiral crossover transition in QCD

We study the underlying topology of gauge fields in 2+1 flavor QCD with domain wall fermions on lattices of size 32(3) x 8, at and immediately above the chiral crossover transition. Using valence overlap fermions with exact index theorem, we focus on its zero modes for different choices of periodicity phases along the temporal direction. Our studies show that the zero modes are due to fractionally charged topological objects, the instanton-dyons. We further provide qualitative study of the interactions between those and compare with the available semi-classical results, finding remarkably accurate agreement in all cases. (C) 2019 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.