Effective theories of confinement

We review some approaches to describe confinement in terms of effective (model) field theories. After a brief discussion of the dual Abelian Higgs model, we concentrate on a lattice analysis of the Faddeev-Niemi effective action conjectured to describe the low-lying excitations of SU(2) gluodynamics. We generalize the effective action such that it contains all operators built from a unit color vector field n with O(3) symmetry and maximally four derivatives. To avoid the presence of Goldstone bosons, we include explicit symmetry breaking terms parametrized by an external field h of mass-dimension two. We find a mass gap of the order of 1.5 GeV