Center vortex model for the infrared sector of Yang–Mills theory—quenched Dirac spectrum and chiral condensate Original Research Article

The Dirac operator describing the coupling of continuum quark fields to SU(2) center vortex world-surfaces composed of elementary squares on a hypercubic lattice is constructed. It is used to evaluate the quenched Dirac spectral density in the random vortex world-surface model, which previously has been shown to quantitatively reproduce both the confinement properties and the topological susceptibility of SU(2) Yang–Mills theory. Under certain conditions on the modeling of the vortex gauge field, a behavior of the quenched chiral condensate as a function of temperature is obtained which is consistent with measurements in SU(2) lattice Yang–Mills theory.