Dual superconductivity in the SU(2) pure gauge vacuum: a lattice study

Abstract

We investigate the dual superconductivity hypothesis in pure SU(2) lattice gauge theory. We focus on the dual Meissner effect by analyzing the distribution of the color fields due to a static quark-antiquark pair. We find evidence of the dual Meissner effect both in the maximally Abelian gauge and without gauge fixing. We measure the London penetration length. Our results suggest that the London penetration length is a physical gauge-invariant quantity. We put out a simple relation between the penetration length and the square root of the string tension. We find that our extimation is quite close to the extrapolated continuum limit available in the literature. A remarkable consequence of our study is that an effective Abelian theory can account for the long range properties of the SU(2) confining vacuum.Comment: 38 pages, uuencoded compressed (using GNU's gzip) tar file containing 1 LaTeX2e file (to be processed 3 times) + 16 encapsulated Postscript figures. A full Postscript version of this paper is available at http://www.ba.infn.it/disk$gruppo_4/cosmai/www/papers/195-95.P