Confinement from Center Vortices I

Abstract

We have already seen a number of indications that the center of the gauge group has something to do with confinement. For one thing, the existence of a non-vanishing asymptotic string tension is tied to the existence, and unbroken realization, of a global center symmetry. Moreover, two of the order parameters for confinement, namely the ‘t Hooft loop B(C) and vortex free energy, are explicitly associated with center vortex creation. But perhaps the strongest motivation for the center vortex mechanism of confinement, to be discussed below, comes from the fact that the asymptotic string tension depends only on the N-ality of the quark charge. Whatever vacuum fluctuations of the gauge field are responsible for an asymptotic string tension for quarks in the fundamental representation, those same fluctuations should not also give rise to an asymptotic string tension for quarks in the adjoint representation, or in any other zero N-ality representation of the gauge group.