Chiral magnetization of non-Abelian vacuum: A lattice study

The chiral magnetization properties of cold and hot vacua are studied using quenched simulations in lattice Yang–Mills theory. In weak external magnetic fields the magnetization is proportional to the first power of the magnetic field. We evaluate numerically the coefficient of the proportionality (the chiral susceptibility) using near-zero eigenmodes of overlap fermions. We found that the product of the chiral susceptibility and the chiral condensate equals to 46(3) MeV46(3) MeV. This value is very close to the phenomenological value of 50 MeV50 MeV. In strong fields the magnetization is a nonlinear function of the applied magnetic field. We find that the nonlinear features of the magnetization are well described by an inverse tangent function. The magnetization is weakly sensitive to temperature in the confinement phase.