Effect of low-lying fermion modes in the $ε$-regime of QCD

Abstract

We investigate the effects of low-lying fermion eigenmodes on the QCD partition function in the $ε$-regime. The fermion determinant is approximated by a truncated product of low-lying eigenvalues of the overlap-Dirac operator. With two flavors of dynamical quarks, we observe that the lattice results for the lowest eigenvalue distribution, eigenvalue sum rules and partition function reproduce the analytic predictions made by Leutwyler and Smilga, which strongly depend on the topological charge of the background gauge configuration. The value of chiral condensate extracted from these measurements are consistent with each other. For one dynamical quark flavor, on the other hand, we find an apparent disagreement among different determinations of the chiral condensate, which may suggest the failure of the $ε$-expansion in the absence of massless Nambu-Goldstone boson.