We argue that the local violation of P invariance in heavy ion collisions is a consequence of the long range topological order which is inherent feature of strongly coupled QCD. A similar phenomenon is known to occur in some topologically ordered condensed matter systems with a gap. We also discuss possible cosmological applications of this long range order in strongly coupled gauge theories. In particular, we argue that the de Sitter behaviour might be dynamically generated as a result of the long range order. In this framework the inflaton is an auxiliary field which effectively describes the dynamics of topological sectors in a gauge theory in the expanding universe, rather than a new dynamical degree of freedom.
Categories: hep-ph gr-qc hep-lat hep-th nucl-th