Center vortices as sources of Abelian dominance in pure SU(2) Yang-Mills theory

TL;DR

This paper explores how center vortices contribute to Abelian dominance and confinement in pure SU(2) Yang-Mills theory, linking topological defects to the mass gap and infrared behavior.

Contribution

It presents a unified description of center vortices and monopoles via Cho decomposition, highlighting their role in confinement and Abelian dominance in Yang-Mills theory.

Findings

Center vortices are linked to Abelian dominance in the infrared regime.

The decoupling of off-diagonal degrees of freedom is related to thick center vortices.

The framework accommodates lattice observations of monopoles and vortices.

Abstract

We argue that in the infrared regime of continuum Yang-Mills theory, the possibility of a mass gap in the charged sector is closely associated with the center vortex sector. The analysis of the possible consequences of the ensembles of defects is done by showing that the description of center vortices and monopoles is naturally unified by means of a careful treatment of Cho decomposition. If on the one hand confinement is usually associated with monopole condensation in a compact abelian model, in this scenario, the previous decoupling of the off-diagonal degrees of freedom, for the abelian model dominate at large distances, can be understood as induced by a phase where center vortices become thick objects. Other important scenarios for correlated monopoles and center vortices, observed in lattice simulations, are also accomodated in our general formulation.