Monopole characteristics in various Abelian gauges - art. no. 054501

Renormalization group (RG) smoothing is employed on the lattice to investig ate and to compare the monopole structure of the SU(2) vacuum as seen in di fferent gauges [maximally Abelian gauge (MAG), Polyakov loop gauge (PG) and Laplacian gauge (LG)]. Physically relevant types of monopoles (LG and MAG) are distinguished by their behavior near the deconfining phase transition. For the LG, Abelian projection reproduces well the gauge independent monop ole structure encoded in an auxiliary Higgs held. Density and localization properties of monopoles, their non-Abelian action and topological charge ar e studied. Results are presented confirming the Abelian dominance with resp ect to the non-perturbative static potential for all gauges considered.