Published for SISSA by Springer Received: May 21, 2019 Revised: June 20, 2019 Accepted: June 26, 2019 Published: July 3, 2019 Fractional θ angle, 't Hooft anomaly, and quantum instantons in charge-q multi-flavor Schwinger model JHEP07(2019)018 Tatsuhiro Misumi,a;b;c Yuya Tanizakid and Mithat Unsal¨ d aDepartment of Mathematical Science, Akita University, Akita 010-8502, Japan biTHEMS Program, RIKEN, Wako 351-0198, Japan cResearch and Education Center for Natural Sciences, Keio University, Kanagawa 223-8521, Japan dDepartment of Physics, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC 27607, U.S.A. E-mail:
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[email protected] Abstract: This work examines non-perturbative dynamics of a 2-dimensional QFT by using discrete 't Hooft anomaly, semi-classics with circle compactification and bosonization. We focus on charge-q N-flavor Schwinger model, and also Wess-Zumino-Witten model. We first apply the recent developments of discrete 't Hooft anomaly matching to theories on R2 and its compactification to R S1 . We then compare the 't Hooft anomaly with × L dynamics of the models by explicitly constructing eigenstates and calculating physical quantities on the cylinder spacetime with periodic and flavor-twisted boundary conditions. We find different boundary conditions realize different anomalies. Especially under the twisted boundary conditions, there are Nq vacua associated with discrete chiral symmetry breaking. Chiral condensates for this case have fractional θ dependence eiθ=Nq, which provides the Nq-branch structure with soft fermion mass. We show that these behaviors at a small circumference cannot be explained by usual instantons but should be understood by \quantum" instantons, which saturate the BPS bound between classical action and quantum-induced effective potential.