θ vacua in the light-cone Schwinger model

Abstract

We discuss the bosonized Schwinger model in light-cone quantization, using discretization as an infrared regulator. We consider both the ligh-cone Coulomb gauge, in which all gauge freedom can be removed and a physical Hilbert space employed, and the light-cone Weyl (temporal) gauge, in which the Hilbert space is unphysical and a Gauss law operator is used to select a physical subspace. We describe the different ways in which the θ vacuum is manifested depending on this choice of gauge, and compute the θ-dependence of the chiral condensate in each case.