Overlap fermions preserve a remnant of chiral symmetry on the lattice. They are a powerful tool to investigate the topological structure of the vacuum of Yang-Mills theory and full QCD. Recent results concerning the localization of topological charge
and the localization and local chirality of the overlap eigenmodes are reported. The charge distribution is radically different, if a spectral cut-off for the Dirac eigenmodes is applied. The density q(x) is changing from the scale-a charge density (with full lattice resolution) to the ultraviolet filtered charge density. The scale-a density, computed on the Linux cluster of LRZ, has a singular, sign-coherent global structure of co-dimension 1 first described by the Kentucky group. We stress, however, the cluster properties of the UV filtered topological density resembling the instanton picture. The spectral cut-off can be mapped to a bosonic smearing procedure. The UV filtered field strength reveals a high degree of (anti)selfduality at hot spots of the action. The fermionic eigenmodes show a high degree of local chirality. The lowest modes are seen to be localized in low-dimensional space-time regions.
Overlap fermions are particularly well suited to study the finite temperature dynamics of the chiral symmetry restoration transition of QCD, which might be just an analytic crossover. Using gauge field configurations on a 24^3x10 lattice with N_f=2 f
lavours of dynamical Wilson-clover quarks generated by the DIK collaboration, we compute the lowest 50 eigenmodes of the overlap Dirac operator and try to locate the transition by fermionic means. We analyse the spectral density, local chirality and localisation properties of the low-lying modes and illustrate the changing topological and (anti-) selfdual structure of the underlying gauge fields across the transition.
We present selected recent results of the QCDSF collaboration on the localization and dimensionality of low overlap eigenmodes and of the topological density in the quenched SU(3) vacuum. We discuss the correlations between the topological structure
revealed by overlap fermions without filtering and the confining monopole and P-vortex structure obtained in the Indirect Maximal Center Gauge.
Overlap fermions have an exact chiral symmetry on the lattice and are thus an appropriate tool for investigating the chiral and topological structure of the QCD vacuum. We study various chiral and topological aspects of quenched gauge field configura
tions. This includes the localization and chiral properties of the eigenmodes, the local structure of the ultraviolet filtered field strength tensor, as well as the structure of topological charge fluctuations. We conclude that the vacuum has a multifractal structure.
