Centre Vortices in SU(3)

Abstract

We investigate the effectiveness of using smearing as a means to generate a preconditioning transformation for gauge fields prior to fixing to Maximal Centre Gauge. This still leaves the gauge-fixed field in the original gauge orbit. As expected, we find that this preconditioning leads to higher maxima of the gauge-fixing condition, resulting in lower numbers of P-vortices. We also find that removing vortices appears to give a loss of confinement for all cases but that the string tension as measured from vortex-only configurations drops from about 65% to as low as 26% when using the preconditioning method.

Comments: 7 pages, 9 figures, talk presented at the XXV International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory, July 30 - August 4, 2007, Regensburg, Germany