Abstract
A simple formal computation, and a variation on an old thought experiment, both indicate that QCD with light quarks may confine fundamental color magnetic charges, giving an explicit as well as elegant resolution to the “global color” paradox, strengthening Vachaspati's SU(5) electric–magnetic duality, opening new lines of inquiry for monopoles in cosmology, and suggesting a class of geometrically large QCD excitations – loops of Z(3) color magnetic flux entwined with light-quark current. The proposal may be directly testable in lattice gauge theory or supersymmetric Yang–Mills theory. Recent results in deeply inelastic electron scattering, and future experiments both there and in high-energy collisions of nuclei, could give evidence on the existence of Z(3) loops. If confirmed, they would represent a consistent realization of the bold concept underlying the Slansky–Goldman–Shaw “glow” model – phenomena besides standard meson–baryon physics manifest at long distance scales – but without that model's isolable fractional electric charges.
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