Meron pairs and fermion zero modes

Merons, conjectured as a semiclassical mechanism for color confinement in QCD, have been described analytically by either infinite action configurations or an Ansatz with discontinuous action. We construct a smooth, finite action, stationary lattice solution corresponding to a meron pair. We also derive an analytical solution for the zero mode of the meron pair Ansatz, show that it has the qualitative behavior of the exact zero mode of the lattice solution, and propose the use of zero modes to identify meron gauge field configurations in stochastic evaluations of the lattice QCD path integral.