Symmetry breaking and magnetic monopoles in strong interactions

The search for quark-gluon plasma in heavy ion reactions needs unusual phenomena characteristic of the high temperature phase of QCD. Quite exotic effects may survive the fragmentation period leading to a unique signature of the quark-gluon plasma. It will be discussed below that the high temperature phase of QCD supports chromomagnetic monopoles and quark states with electric change e=1/6. The starting point of the arguments is that the Polyakov line serves as a composite Higgs field and the formalism of symmetry broken Yang-Mills-Higgs systems is relevant in high temperature QCD. (orig.)