Path integral bosonization of the 't Hooft determinant: fluctuations and multiple vacua

Abstract

The 't Hooft six-quark flavor mixing interaction (Nf=3) is bosonized by the path integral method. The considered complete Lagrangian is constructed on the basis of the combined 't Hooft and U(3)×U(3) extended chiral four fermion Nambu-Jona-Lasinio interactions. The method of the steepest descents is used to derive the effective mesonic Lagrangian. Additionally to the known lowest order stationary phase (SP) result of Reinhardt and Alkofer we obtain the contribution from the small quantum fluctuations of bosonic configurations around their stationary phase trajectories. It affects the vacuum state of hadrons at low energies: whereas without the inclusion of quantum fluctuations the vacuum is uniquely defined for a fixed set of the model parameters, fluctuations give rise to multivalued solutions of the gap equations, marked at instances by drastic changes in the quark condensates. We derive the new gap equations and analyze them in comparison with known results. We classify the solutions according to the number of extrema they may accommodate. We find up to four solutions in the 0<mu,ms<3 GeV region.