Center vortices as sources of Abelian dominance in pure SU(2) Yang-Mills theory

We argue that in the infrared regime of continuum Yang-Mills theory, the possibility of a mass gap in the charged sector is closely associated with the center vortex sector. The analysis of the possible consequences of the ensembles of defects is done by showing that the description of center vortices and monopoles is naturally unified by means of a careful treatment of Cho decomposition. If on the one hand confinement is usually associated with monopole condensation in a compact abelian model, in this scenario, the previous decoupling of the off-diagonal degrees of freedom, for the abelian model dominate at large distances, can be understood as induced by a phase where center vortices become thick objects. Other important scenarios for correlated monopoles and center vortices, observed in lattice simulations, are also accomodated in our general formulation.Comment: 36 pages, improved version containing a more general discussio