Laplacian Center Vortices

Abstract

I present a unified picture of center vortices and Abelian monopoles. Both appear as local gauge ambiguities in the Laplacian Center Gauge. This gauge is constructed for a general SU(N) theory. Numerical evidence is presented, for SU(2) and SU(3), that the projected $Z_N$ theory confines with a string tension similar to the non-Abelian one.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figures; talk presented at "Confinement 2000", Osaka, March 200