Microscopic universality in the spectrum of the lattice Dirac operator

Large ensembles of complete spectra of the Euclidean Dirac operator for staggered fermions are calculated for SU(2) lattice gauge theory. The accumulation of eigenvalues near zero is analyzed as a signal of chiral symmetry breaking and compared with parameter-free predictions from chiral random matrix theory. Excellent agreement for the distribution of the smallest eigenvalue and the microscopic spectral density is found. This provides direct evidence for the conjecture that these quantities are universal functions.