Nonperturbative flavor breaking in topological susceptibility at chiral crossover

Abstract

We demonstrate that the QCD topological susceptibility nonperturbatively gets a significant contribution signaled by flavor-nonuniversal quark condensates at around the pseudo-critical temperature of the chiral crossover. It implies a remarkable flavor breaking in the axial anomaly as well as the QCD theta vacuum in high temperature QCD, which are almost flavor universal in the vacuum. A nontrivial flavor breaking is triggered by nonperturbative thermal loop corrections at around the chiral crossover, which is different from the trivial flavor violation just scaled by the quark mass ratio, observed at asymptotically high temperatures. This critical flavor violation cannot be dictated by the chiral perturbation theory with that lattice QCD usually compares, or the dilute instanton gas approximation based on that its astrophysical implications have conventionally been made. This would give an impact on the thermal history and the cosmological evolution of QCD axion including the estimate of the relic abundance as a dark matter candidate.