  We study the spectrum of low-lying eigenmodes of the kinetic operator for
scalar particles, in the color adjoint representation of Yang-Mills theory. The
kinetic operator is the covariant Laplacian, plus a constant which serves to
renormalize mass. In the pure gauge theory, our data indicates that the
interval between the lowest eigenvalue and the mobility edge tends to infinity
in the continuum limit. On these grounds, it is suggested that the perturbative
expression for the scalar propagator may be misleading even at distance scales
that are small compared to the confinement scale. We also measure the density
of low-lying eigenmodes, and find a possible connection to multi-critical
matrix models of order m=1.
