Quantum mechanically induced Hopf term in the O(3) nonlinear sigma model Original Research Article

The Hopf term in the (2+ 1)-dimensional O(3) nonlinear sigma model, which is known to be responsible for fractional spin and statistics, is re-examined from the viewpoint of quantization ambiguity. It is confirmed that the Hopf term can be understood as a term induced quantum mechanically, in precisely the same manner as the θ-term in QCD. We present a detailed analysis of the topological aspect of the model based on the adjoint orbit parametrization of the spin vectors, which is not only very useful in handling topological (soliton and/or Hopf) numbers, but also plays a crucial role in defining the Hopf term for configurations of nonvanishing soliton numbers. The Hopf term is seen to arise explicitly as a quantum effect which emerges when quantizing an S1 degree of freedom hidden in the configuration space.