Pandora’s box and non-selfdual topological excitations

In the last few years, we have realized the existence of a new class of topological excitations, which are rather distinct from the platonic world of monopoles, monopole-instantons and instantons. All of the latter arise as solutions of the Prasad-Sommerfield type first order differential (self-duality) equations and have been extensively discussed in the context of confinement and chiral symmetry breaking for the last 30 years. However, new calculable deformations of asymptotically free chiral and vector-like gauge theories give us a new picture of these physical phenomena. Most often, the excitations which lead to confinement are not solutions to PS-type equations, they are non-selfdual and they are often bizarre. They are referred to as magnetic bions, triplets, and quintets, due to their composite nature. Bizarre as they are, combined with large-N volume independence, these novel non-self-dual excitations may also provide hope that at least some non-abelian gauge theories may be solvable. Dedicated to Misha Shifman on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday. This write-up summarizes my interactions with him during our fruitful collaborations and important open problems in gauge theories.