Divergent chiral condensate in the quenched Schwinger model

Abstract

We calculate numerically the eigenvalue distribution of the overlap Dirac operator in the quenched Schwinger model on a lattice. The distribution does not fit any of the three universality classes of spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking, and its strong volume dependence indicates that the chiral condensate in the quenched theory is an ill-defined and divergent quantity. When we reweight configurations with the Dirac determinant to study the theory with N_f=1, we obtain a distribution of eigenvalues that is well-behaved and consistent with the theory of explicit symmetry breaking due to the anomaly.

Comments: 9 pages, 8 figures, RevTeX 4. Added results for distribution of second eigenvalue in Nf=1 theory