  Gluon field configurations with non-trivial topology like instantons,
magnetic monopoles and center vortices play a crucial role in QCD and, in
particular, for the spontaneous breaking of chiral symmetry. Moreover, center
vortices are strongly correlated with confinement. We present evidence, that
there is a deep connection between the topology of gauge fields and center
vortices. We use the chirally improved lattice Dirac operator to compute
eigenvectors and eigenvalues of various lattice gauge field configurations.
Removing vortices from thermalized configurations also removes the topological
content of the gauge field. As a consistency check, we apply random changes to
the raw configurations.
