Magnetic Defects Signal Failure of Abelian Projection Gauges in QCD

Abstract

Magnetically charged Abelian defects are shown to arise on most compact base manifolds and in most Abelian projection gauges. They obey the Dirac quantisation condition and give rise to homogeneous magnetic background fields. The reasons for their occurrence are global failures of the procedure with which gauge covariant operators are diagonalised or their eigenphases extracted. Defects related to the former case are string-like; for the latter case they resemble domain walls. Either configuration forms the generic case and indicates a failure of gauge fixing as continuity and periodicity properties of the functional space are changed. These results are first obtained in canonically quantised QCD_{3+1} and path integral QCD_{2+1} on the torus for the modified axial gauge which keeps only the eigenphases as dynamical variables of the Wilson line in the x_3-direction. In the end, they are extended to other gauges, dimensions and standard manifolds.