Fractional topological charges and the lowest Dirac modes

Abstract

We introduce vortex configurations with fractional topological charges where one unicolor or colorful intersection of two perpendicular vortex pairs contributes to the topological charge of the configurations. Using both, the overlap and asqtad staggered fermion formulations, the lowest modes of the Dirac operator on the noninteger $Q$ configurations are studied in the fundamental and adjoint representations. We analyze the behavior of the fundamental and adjoint fermions in the background of the topological charge contributions of $|Q|=0.5$.