Smoothing properties of the Wilson flow and the topological charge

Abstract

We study SU$(N_C)$ gauge theories with a single fermion in the two-index antisymmetric representation to predict the mesonic spectrum of supersymmetric $\mathcal{N}=1$ SYM theories. Using gradient flow methods, we investigate fractional topological charges in $N_C = 4$ ensembles with varying lattice spacings. We show that the use of overimproved gauge actions (specifically the DBW2 action) in the smearing kernel stabilises the values of the topological charge already at moderate values of the flow time, while this is not the case for the standard Wilson flow.