Confinement and Topological Charge in the Abelian Gauge of QCD

We study the relation between instantons and monopoles in the abelian gauge. First, we investigate the monopole in the multi-instanton solution in the continuum Yang-Mills theory using the Polyakov gauge. At a large instanton density, the monopole trajectory becomes highly complicated, which can be regarded as a signal of monopole condensation. Second, we study instantons and monopoles in the SU(2) lattice gauge theory both in the maximally abelian (MA) gauge and in the Polyakov gauge. Using the $16^3 \times 4$ lattice, we find monopole dominance for instantons in the confinement phase even at finite temperatures. A linear-type correlation is found between the total monopole-loop length and the integral of the absolute value of the topological density (the total number of instantons and anti-instantons) in the MA gauge. We conjecture that instantons enhance the monopole-loop length and promote monopole condensation.