Paper detail

Exploring a hidden symmetry with electrically charged quarks

It is usual to study confinement via quantum chromodynamics (QCD) alone. The deconfinement transition of the pure gauge theory (i.e. with static quarks) is then characterized by the breaking of center symmetry. Center vortices offer an intuitive and quantitative description of the transition. Dynamical quarks explicitly break center symmetry, and the phase transition becomes a crossover. However, it may be misleading to study QCD in isolation. Quarks also carry fractional electric charge. This bestows the Standard Model with a global center symmetry that combines color center phases with an appropriate electromagnetic phase. Is this symmetry relevant to confinement? We begin our investigation by studying a 2-color model of QCD with half-integer electrically charged quarks.