A general relation between kink-exchange and kink-rotation (Q1118204)

The twin phenomena of emergent spin and statistics have by now been found in a large number of quantum theories, including General Relativity, non- Abelian gauge theories, and nonlinear \(\sigma\)-models. In the latter class of theories the basic fields are spacetime scalars, but they admit topologically non-trivial excitations (``kinks'') which can carry half- integer spin and display fermionic statistics. In particular the so- called ``chiral models'' describe the proton and other baryons as topological excitations of meson fields taking their values in SU(N), N being the number of ``flavors''. The fact that hadrons manifest a spin- statistics correlation (fermionic \(\Leftrightarrow\) spinorial, bosonic \(\Leftrightarrow\) tensorial) should then express some basic topological property of \(\sigma\)-modules. The paper under review identifies this property as follows. For a given kink configuration one can define a certain ``spin-map'' from SO(3) into the space of field configurations, and a certain ``statistics map'' from \(RP^ 2\) into the same space. Following Finkelstein and Rubbinstein one constructs a homotopy deforming the second map into the restriction of the first map to the equatorial \(RP^ 2\) within \(SO(3)=RP^ 3\). The existence of this homotopy, in conjunction with certain facts about U(1) fiber bundles, then implies a spin-statistics theorem within a broad class of quantizations of the underlying \(\sigma\)-models. In particular the paper established for the first time that the 3-flavor chiral model yields the correct statistics for the nucleon multiplet.