Nature of the vacuum inside the color flux tube

The interior of the color flux tube joining a quark pair can be probed by evaluating the correlator of pair of Polyakov loops in a vacuum modified by another Polyakov pair, in order to check the dual superconductivity conjecture, which predicts a deconfined, hot core. We also point out that at the critical point of any 3D gauge theories with a continuous deconfining transition the Svetitsky-Yaffe conjecture provides us with an analytic expression of the Polyakov correlator as a function of the location of the probe inside the flux tube. Both these predictions are compared with numerical results in 3D Z2 gauge model, finding complete agreement. (orig.)