On topological properties of vacuum defects in lattice Yang-Mills theories

We study correlation between topological fermionic modes and center vortices in lattice Yang-Mills theory. The measurements are performed on the original configurations, without any smoothing of the fields which allows to study dependence on the lattice spacing a. We use the overlap Dirac operator to define the fermionic modes. We find strong correlation between intensities of the low-lying Dirac modes and of the vortices. Moreover, the correlation grows with diminishing lattice spacing giving further support to the conjecture that violation of chirality conservation is related to lower dimensional vacuum defects.