Understanding chiral symmetry breaking with the overlap action

Abstract

A chiral fermion action allows one to do very clean studies of chiral symmetry breaking in QCD. I will briefly describe how to compute with the overlap action (relatively) cheaply, and then turn to physics: Low modes of the Dirac operator show a ``lumped'' chiral density which peaks at the locations of instantons and anti-instantons. These modes dominate correlation functions at small quark mass in many channels. The picture qualitatively (and in some cases quantitatively) resembles an instanton liquid model.