Confinement from center vortices: A review of old and new results

I briefly review the numerical evidence, some old and some quite recent, in favor of the center vortex theory of confinement.Center vortices provide a plausible and well-motivated mechanism for confinement, deconfinement, chiral symmetry breaking, and the generation of topological charge. It is more than a model. Center vortices are found in thermalized lattices obtained from lattice Monte Carlo simulations, and it is found that first: vortex density scales according to asymptotic freedom, secondly: vortex-only configurations account, more-or-less accurately, for the observed asymptotic string tension, quark propagator, instanton density, and the general qualitative features of the hadron spectrum, while vortex-removed configurations have none of these properties. That's the good news. The bad news is that vortex configurations, as thick surfaces in four Euclidean dimensions, do not lend themselves to an analytic treatment. So while I believe the vortex theory is correct, I also think it will probably not help us to solve QCD. The method which really does solve QCD is the lattice Monte Carlo method, and yet using this method to compute, e.g., the hadron spectrum, does not necessarily supply much physical insight