A curious behavior of three-dimensional lattice Dirac operators coupled to monopole background

Abstract

We investigate numerically the effect of regulating fermions in the presence of singular background fields in three dimensions. For this, we couple free lattice fermions to a background compact U(1) gauge field consisting of a monopole-anti-monopole pair of magnetic charge $\pm Q$ separated by a distance $s$ in a periodic $L^3$ lattice, and study the low-lying eigenvalues of different lattice Dirac operators under a continuum limit defined by taking $L\to \infty$ at fixed $s/L$. As the background gauge field is parity even, we look for a two-fold degeneracy of the Dirac spectrum that is expected of a continuum-like Dirac operator. The naive-Dirac operator exhibits such a parity-doubling, but breaks the degeneracy of the fermion-doubler modes for the $Q$ lowest eigenvalues in the continuum limit. The Wilson-Dirac operator lifts the fermion-doublers but breaks the parity-doubling in the $Q$ lowest modes even in the continuum limit. The overlap-Dirac operator shows parity-doubling of all the modes even at finite $L$ that is devoid of fermion-doubling, and singles out as a properly regulated continuum Dirac operator in the presence of singular gauge field configurations albeit with a peculiar algorithmic issue.

Comments: 21 pages, 9 figures