Speaker
Description
Proliferation of magnetic objects, such as monopoles and center vortices, provides intuitive explanations for color confinement. However, there does not exist local gauge-invariant definition of those objects in general, and the precise characterization of these confinement criteria is missing. In this talk, we propose the gauge-invariant characterization that distinguishes monopole and center-vortex condensation using the twisted partition functions with 1-form symmetry. After justifying why our proposal is reasonable, we then show that the gapped center-vortex condensed phase necessarily satisfies the monopole condensation using the technique of topological field theories. The talk is based on the recent work in collaboration with Yui Hayashi, https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17708.