Abelian projection on the torus for general gauge groups Original Research Article

We consider Yang-Mills theories with general gauge groups G and twists of the four-torus. We find consistent boundary conditions for gauge fields in all instanton sectors. An extended abelian projection with respect to the Polyakov loop operator is presented, where A0 is independent of time and in the Cartan subalgebra. Fundamental domains for the gauge fixed A0 are constructed for arbitrary gauge groups. In the sectors with non-vanishing instanton number such gauge fixings are necessarily singular. The singularities can be restricted to Dirac strings joining magnetically charged defects. The magnetic charges of these monopoles take their values in the co-root lattice of the gauge group. We relate the magnetic charges of the defects and the windings of suitable Higgs fields about these defects to the instanton number.