Vortex dominance of the 0+ and 2+ glueball mass in SU(2) lattice gauge theory

TL;DR

This study investigates the role of Z_2 vortices in SU(2) lattice gauge theory by constructing vortex ensembles through a cooling method and comparing glueball masses with full configurations, revealing close agreement and enhanced operator overlaps.

Contribution

It introduces a cooling-based method to isolate Z_2 vortex structures and compares their influence on glueball masses with full SU(2) configurations, highlighting the vortex dominance.

Findings

Glueball masses from vortex ensembles agree within 10% of full configurations.

Overlaps of operators with glueball wavefunctions are larger in vortex ensembles.

Vortex structures significantly influence the glueball spectrum.

Abstract

The c-vortex ensembles are constructed by means of the recently proposed cooling method which gradually removes the SU(2)/Z_2 coset fields from the SU(2) lattice configurations and which thus reveals the Z_2 vortex vacuum texture. Using Teper's blocking method, the screening masses of the 0+ and the 2+ glueball is calculated from these vortex ensembles and compared with the masses obtained from full configurations. The masses of either case agree within the achieved numerical accuracy of 10%. As a byproduct, we find that the overlaps of the Teper operators with the glueball wavefunctions are significantly larger in the case of the c-vortex ensembles.