We consider the lattice topological charge density introduced by Hasenfratz, Laliena, and Niedermayer and propose its eigenmode expansion as a tool to investigate the structure of topological charge fluctuations in QCD. The resulting effective density is built from local chiralities studied previously. At every order of the expansion, the density exactly sums up to the global topological charge, and the leading term describes the maximally smooth space-time distribution of charge relevant for propagating light fermions. We use this framework to demonstrate our previous suggestion that the bulk of the topological charge in QCD does not effectively appear in the form of quantized unit lumps. Our conclusion implies that it is unlikely that the mixing of “would-be” zero modes associated with such lumps is the prevalent microscopic mechanism for spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking in QCD. We also present the first results quantitatively characterizing the space-time behavior of effective densities. For coherent fluctuations contained in spherical regions, we find a continuous distribution of associated charges essentially ending at $\approx \mathrm{0.5.}$

• Received 8 April 2002

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.67.011501