# Laplacian Abelian Projection: Abelian dominance and Monopole dominanceContribution to Lattice ’98, Boulder, CO, USA, July ’98. ETH-Zürich preprint SCSC-TR-98-08.

## 1 INTRODUCTION

Despite its many successes, the Maximally Abelian Gauge (MAG)  has the great drawback that it is ambiguous. A precise way to phrase this ambiguity is as follows: it is in general unlikely, and certainly impossible to guarantee, that the configuration obtained by the usual local iterative minimization algorithm be (arbitrarily) close to the desired configuration $`\{\overline{U}_{\mu ,x}=\overline{\mathrm{\Omega }}_xU_{\mu ,x}\overline{\mathrm{\Omega }}_{x+\widehat{\mu }}^+\}`$, no matter how high the numerical precision of the computer and no matter how long the iteration is continued. (The reason is well known: one may get stuck in a local minimum.) Here $`\{\overline{\mathrm{\Omega }}_x\}`$ is the unknown, true (absolute) minimum of the functional

$$\stackrel{~}{𝒮}_U(\mathrm{\Omega })=\underset{x,\mu }{}\left\{1\frac{1}{2}\mathrm{Tr}\left[\sigma _3U_{\mu ,x}^{(\mathrm{\Omega })}\sigma _3U_{\mu ,x}^{(\mathrm{\Omega })+}\right]\right\}.$$
(1)   
As a consequence, a different result is obtained if the procedure is applied to the same configuration several times, starting from a different (random) gauge each time . In physical terms: gauge covariance is lost.

The Laplacian Abelian Gauge (LAG)  solves this problem. This is a unique and unambiguous gauge fixing prescription which can be pursued to arbitrarily high precision. Gauge covariance is guaranteed, and one has control over numerical errors.

In addition, LAG leads to at least as smooth configurations as MAG. This is important for a reliable extraction of Abelian continuum gauge fields $`A_\mu (x)`$. In fact, in Ref.  it was argued that the fields in the LAG can be considered to be smoother than in the MAG, as physical monopoles are treated more “respectfully” in the Laplacian gauge.

The present contribution focuses on abelian and monopole dominance  in LAG and MAG.

## 2 THE LAPLACIAN METHOD

The minimization problem of Eq. (1) can be viewed as the minimization of the gauge covariant kinetic energy of a real adjoint scalar field $`\varphi ^a`$ ($`a=1,2,3`$). In continuum notation :

$$\stackrel{~}{𝒮}_A(\varphi )=_V\frac{1}{2}(D_\mu \varphi )^2.$$
(2)   
The ambiguities in the MAG arise because of the constraints $`|\varphi (x)|=_{a=1}^3(\varphi ^a)^2=1`$.

The idea of the Laplacian gauge fixing is to relax the latter constraint. Minimization of (1,2) then amounts to determining the lowest mode of the covariant Laplacian $`(D_\mu )^2`$. The corresponding lowest eigenvector $`\varphi _0`$ determines the gauge transformation to be applied to the gauge field configuration. Subsequently, the abelian projected fields can be extracted in the standard way.

The computation of the lowest eigenmode can be done to arbitrary precision, using standard sparse matrix routines (Lanczos, Rayleigh-Ritz). The only ambiguity arises when the lowest eigenvalue is degenerate. This would signal a true Gribov copy. In practice, however, this never occurs.

For further details, see Refs. .

## 3 ABELIAN DOMINANCE AND <br>MONOPOLE DOMINANCE

We consider a set of 18 pure SU(2) configurations on a $`16^4`$ lattice at $`\beta =2.5`$. These configurations are gauge fixed using MAG and LAG, and for both gauge fixed configurations the abelian field components are extracted, and the elementary-cube monopoles are identified using the standard prescription. In this way we can compare results in the two gauges on the same set of SU(2) configurations.

Wilson loops and Creutz ratios are calculated from the original (“full”) non-abelian SU(2) configurations, from the abelian fields in both gauges, and from the abelian fields generated by the monopole content only. The Creutz ratios are defined as

$`\chi (R+{\displaystyle \frac{1}{2}},T+{\displaystyle \frac{1}{2}})=`$ (3)   
$`\mathrm{ln}{\displaystyle \frac{W(R,T)W(R+1,T+1)}{W(R,T+1)W(R+1,T)}},`$   
where $`W(R,T)`$ denotes an $`R\times T`$ Wilson loop. Statistical errors have been determined by means of a bootstrap analysis on each of the Creutz ratios $`\chi (R+\frac{1}{2},T+\frac{1}{2})`$ separately.

The MAG fixing was done using a standard iterative algorithm, with alternating cooling and overrelaxation sweeps, and a very tight stopping criterion: the iteration was terminated when $`\frac{1}{2}`$Tr of the gauge transformation matrix connecting subsequent configurations deviated from unity less than $`10^{12}`$ at each site.

Abelian dominance. Fig. 1 shows diagonal Creutz ratios for the full and the abelian projected theories. Although the large-distance data are fairly noisy, the trend is the same as in the work of other authors: the full and abelian data sets seem to approach a single plateau at large distances, in agreement with a linearly confining potential, and with abelian dominance.

It is interesting to compare the two abelian projections, MAG and LAG. The data sets almost coincide, but there is a small but significant difference, at least in the short-distance regime: the LAG data lie closer to the full SU(2) data than the MAG data, suggesting quantitatively stronger abelian dominance when the Laplacian Abelian Projection is used. It would be very interesting to see how this behaviour evolves at larger distances.

Monopole dominance. Before presenting the results, let us discuss the important point that the monopole gauge field cannot be computed from the usual monopole currents $`k_\mu `$ alone. (See Ref. , Eqs. (24), (30).) In Landau gauge one has

$$A_\mu ^{\mathrm{mon}}(x)=2\pi \underset{y}{}D(xy)_\nu ^{}\stackrel{~}{m}_{\nu \mu }(y),$$
(4)   
where $`\stackrel{~}{m}_{\nu \mu }`$ is the dual of the “Dirac sheet” field $`m_{\nu \mu }`$, and $`D(xy)`$ is the 4-dimensional Coulomb propagator. It is this gauge field $`A_\mu ^{\mathrm{mon}}`$ which determines the monopole Wilson loop. In addition to the contribution from the monopole currents $`k_\mu (x)`$, given by

$$k_\mu (x)=_\nu m_{\nu \mu }(x),$$
(5)   
there is an additional contribution from the zero mode in $`m_{\nu \mu }`$. If this zero-mode contribution is ignored, a ‘trivial’ $`N_s\times N_t`$ Wilson loop will not equal unity.

Fig. 2 shows diagonal Creutz ratios for the monopole part of the abelian potential, for MAG and LAG. There is a notable difference between the two projections. The LAG signal decays to a plateau, which allows an excellent fit, leading to a LAG-monopole string tension of

$$a^2\sigma _{\mathrm{mon}}=0.0321(6),$$
(6)   
in excellent agreement with the full string tension on the same lattice .

The MAG Creutz ratios, on the other hand, show a rising tendency. In view of the small error bars it is difficult to argue that the data are consistent with a plateau, and no asymptotic string tension can be extracted.

A possible explanation is as follows. The MAG algorithm is a local iterative procedure, which does well locally but is unable to do the global optimization well. As a result of this defect in the gauge fixing algorithm, artificial decorrelations in abelian projected or monopole Wilson loops might show up at some intermediate distance, leading to an apparently smaller correlation length, hence an apparently larger string tension. In other words, imperfect gauge fixing leads to abelian projected and monopole string tensions which are larger than the true non-abelian string tension. The rising tendency of the MAG Creutz ratios in Fig. 2 with distance might reflect precisely this effect.

The Laplacian projection, on the other hand, by construction looks at the lowest-momentum, longest-distance eigenmode of the covariant Laplacian, so a similar artificial intermediate-distance decorrelation is expected (and confirmed) to be absent.

It is a pleasure to thank Ph. de Forcrand for stimulating discussions.