2026/04/27 by Tereza Mendes, Luis E. Oxman, Gustavo M. Simões +1
#hep-lat #hep-ph #hep-th
We propose and analyze a new method of detecting center vortices and monopoles in lattice Yang-Mills theory. This procedure is sensitive to the intrinsic degeneracy of the center charges, which play a crucial role in how these topological objects interact and correlate with one another. Our approach is based on fixing the Maximal Abelian gauge (MAG) and decomposing the link configuration in a suitable way to look for so-called Cartan fluxes, by projecting the gauge fields onto the Cartan subalgebra. The method directly assigns the detection of monopoles to the roots of the gauge group, allowing a clearer and more robust characterization of the Abelian-charge content of the gauge configuration. Our discussion is general for SU(N) gauge theory, but we focus our applications on the SU(3) case. For the SU(2) case, our proposed parametrization is equivalent to the standard one. We present a numerical study of the monopole density in SU(3) theory, obtained using our method. A sizable difference in the number of monopoles is found between our proposed method and the standard one. Also, we observe a Weyl-symmetric distribution of monopole charges.