# Quark confinement to be caused by Abelian or non-Abelian dual superconductivity in the SU(3) Yang-Mills theory

## TL;DR

This paper investigates two reformulations of SU(3) Yang-Mills theory, called maximal and minimal options, to understand their roles in dual superconductivity mechanisms for quark confinement, using lattice simulations at finite temperature.

## Contribution

It compares maximal and minimal reformulations of SU(3) Yang-Mills theory to distinguish their roles in dual superconductivity for quark confinement through lattice simulations.

## Key findings

- Both options exhibit confinement/deconfinement phase transitions.
- Polyakov-loop distributions differ between the two reformulations.
- Chromoelectric flux distributions support dual superconductivity in both options.

## Abstract

The dual superconductivity is a promising mechanism for quark confinement. We have presented a new formulation of the Yang-Mills theory on the lattice that enables us to change the original non-Abelian gauge field into the new field variables such that one of them called the restricted field gives the dominant contribution to quark confinement in the gauge independent way. We have pointed out that the SU(3) Yang-Mills theory has another reformulation using new field variables (minimal option), in addition to the way adopted by Cho, Faddeev and Niemi (maximal option). In the past lattice conferences, we have shown the numerical evidences that support the non-Abelian dual superconductivity using the minimal option for the SU(3) Yang-Mills theory. This result should be compared with Abelian dual superconductivity obtained in the maximal option which is a gauge invariant extension of the conventional Abelian projection method in the maximal Abelian gauge. In this talk, we focus on discriminating between two reformulations, i.e., maximal and minimal options of the $SU(3)$ Yang-Mills theory from the viewpoint of dual superconductivity for quark confinement. We investigate the confinement/deconfinement phase transitions at finite temperature in both options, which are compared with the original Yang-Mills theory. For this purpose, we measure the distribution of Polyakov-loops and the Polyakov-loop average, the correlation function of the Polyakov loops and the distribution of the chromoelectric flux connecting a quark and antiquark in both confinement and deconfinement phases.