Monopoles and Quark Confinement: Introduction and Overview

Abstract

We (try to) pedagogically explain how monopoles arise in QCD, why maximal Abelian(MA) gauge is ``special'' for monopole study, the Abelian projection in MA gauge, its resultant degrees of freedom(photons, monopoles and charged matter fields), and the QCD-equivalent action in terms of these degrees of freedom. Then we turn to more recent developments in the subject: Abelian dominance, large $N$ behavior of Abelian projected QCD, mass of the charged matter fields, notion of an effective photon-monopole action obtained by integrating out the charged matter fields, and problems encountered in the recent evaluation of this effective action using the microcanonical demon method on the lattice.

arXiv comment22 pages, to be published in Lake Louise Winter Institute Proceedings (just fixing some typos)