Instantons and chiral symmetry breaking in SU( N) gauge theories

Abstract

We address the question of whether the low modes of the Dirac operator are caused by topological objects such as instantons in SU( N) gauge theories. We study the pseudo-scalar density of these modes, finding the size distributions of the instantons, and comparing it with the underlying gauge field. We find that, although the near-zero modes of the Dirac operator depend on topology for all N, their small instanton content decreases as N increases.