The ’t Hooft vertex revisited

In 1976 ’t Hooft introduced an elegant approach towards understanding the physical consequences of the topological structures that appear in non-Abelian gauge theories. These effects are concisely summarized in terms of an effective multi-fermion interaction. These old arguments provide a link between a variety of recent and sometimes controversial ideas including discrete chiral symmetries appearing in some models for unification, ambiguities in the definition of quark masses, and flaws with some simulation algorithms in lattice gauge theory.