The local structure of low-lying eigenmodes of the overlap Dirac operator is studied. It is found that these modes cannot be described as linear combinations of 't Hooft "would-be" zeromodes associated with instanton excitations that underly the Instanton Liquid Model. This implies that the instanton liquid scenario for spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking in QCD is not accurate. More generally, our data suggests that the vacuum fluctuations of topological charge are not effectively dominated by localized lumps of unit charge with which the topological "would-be" zeromodes could be associated.

Authors: I. Horvath, S.J. Dong, T. Draper, F.X. Lee, H.B. Thacker, J.B. Zhang

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