Effects of topology in the Dirac spectrum of staggered fermions

We compare the lower edge spectral fluctuations of the staggered lattice Dirac operator for the Schwinger model with the predictions of chiral random matrix theory (chRMT). We verify their range of applicability, checking in particular the rôle of non-trivial topological sectors and the flavor symmetry of the staggered fermions for finite lattice spacing. Approaching the continuum limit we indeed find clear signals for topological modes in the eigenvalue spectrum. These findings indicate problems in the verification of the chRMT predictions.