Abstract
The vortex free energy was proposed to distinguish between the confinement and the Higgs phase (in the sense of 't Hooft) in lattice gauge theory, when matter fields are present that transform according to an arbitrary representation of the gauge group. In this paper I consider the Z(2) Higgs model and calculate the vortex free energy in the screening part of the confining/screening phase of Fradkin and Shenker. The result does not agree with the expected behavior that corresponds to the structure of the phase diagram. Therefore the vortex free energy is no longer a good indicator for confinement when matter fields transform non-trivially under the center of the gauge group (such as Z(2) Higgs scalars).
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