A fresh look at the confinement mechanism

Topological configurations, monopoles and vortices, successfully describe quark confinement and the spontaneous breakdown of chiral symmetry. Despite their infinite action, these configurations are relevant due to a subtle cancellation between action and entropy. A natural explanation for this intrinsic fine-tuning is that smooth low action configurations exist which confine and which appear as singular topological objects in certain gauges. To reveal these confining semi-classical configurations, a new cooling method is proposed which largely reduces the action while preserving the asymptotic quark-antiquark potential. First numerical results for a SU(2) gauge theory show that confining configurations with an average plaquette as high as 0.95 do exist.