Cooling, smearing and Dirac eigenmodes - A comparison of filtering methods in lattice gauge theory

Starting from thermalized quenched SU(2) configurations we apply cooling or iterated smearing, respectively, to produce sequences of gauge configurations with less and less fluctuations. We compute the low lying spectrum and eigenmodes of the lattice Dirac operator and compare them for the two types of smoothing. Many characteristic properties of the eigensystem remain invariant for all configurations in our sequences. We also find that cooling and smearing produce surprisingly similar results. Both observations could be indications that the two filtering methods do not drastically alter the long range structures in the gauge field.