Topological Susceptibility of Yang-Mills Center Projection Vortices

TL;DR

This paper measures the topological susceptibility of center projection vortices in SU(2) lattice Yang-Mills theory, demonstrating that vortex structures account for the vacuum's topological properties.

Contribution

It provides the first consistent estimate of topological susceptibility from vortex structures, aligning with full lattice results, and explores smoothing procedures to refine measurements.

Findings

Vortex-based susceptibility matches full lattice results.

Smoothing procedures effectively eliminate ultraviolet noise.

Vortex content explains the topological properties of the Yang-Mills vacuum.

Abstract

The topological susceptibility induced by center projection vortices extracted from SU(2) lattice Yang-Mills configurations via the maximal center gauge is measured. Two different smoothing procedures, designed to eliminate spurious ultraviolet fluctuations of these vortices before evaluating the topological charge, are explored. They result in consistent estimates of the topological susceptibility carried by the physical thick vortices characterizing the Yang-Mills vacuum in the vortex picture. This susceptibility is comparable to the one obtained from the full lattice Yang-Mills configurations. The topological properties of the SU(2) Yang-Mills vacuum can thus be accounted for in terms of its vortex content.