Gauge invariance of color confinement due to the dual Meissner effect caused by Abelian monopoles

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that Abelian monopoles extracted from non-Abelian gauge fields can explain color confinement in SU(2) lattice gauge theory through the dual Meissner effect, independent of gauge fixing.

Contribution

It provides gauge-invariant evidence that Abelian monopoles cause the dual Meissner effect, leading to color confinement in non-Abelian gauge theories.

Findings

The string tension from Abelian and monopole potentials matches the non-Abelian tension.

Color-electric fields form flux tubes due to monopole supercurrents.

The vacuum exhibits properties of a near-border dual superconductor.

Abstract

The mechanism of non-Abelian color confinement is studied in SU(2) lattice gauge theory in terms of the Abelian fields and monopoles extracted from non-Abelian link variables without adopting gauge fixing. Firstly, the static quark-antiquark potential and force are computed with the Abelian and monopole Polyakov loop correlators, and the resulting string tensions are found to be identical to the non-Abelian string tension. These potentials also show the scaling behavior with respect to the change of lattice spacing. Secondly, the profile of the color-electric field between a quark and an antiquark is investigated with the Abelian and monopole Wilson loops. The color-electric field is squeezed into a flux tube due to monopole supercurrent with the same Abelian color direction. The parameters corresponding to the penetration and coherence lengths show the scaling behavior, and the ratio of these lengths, i.e, the Ginzburg-Landau parameter, indicates that the vacuum type is near the border of the type1 and type2 (dual) superconductor. These results are summarized that the Abelian fundamental charge defined in an arbitrary color direction is confined inside a hadronic state by the dual Meissner effect. As the color-neutral state in any Abelian color direction corresponds to the physical color-singlet state, this effect explains non-Abelian color confinement and supports the existence of a gauge-invariant mechanism of color confinement due to the dual Meissner effect caused by Abelian monopoles.