Superconductivity: A testing ground for models of confinement

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Abstract
The interaction of a magnetic monopole-antimonopole pair in a superconductor is calculated as a function of their separation and the value of the Landau-Ginzburg parameter. This direct numerical result is then compared to the bag approximation to the same interaction in a superconducting medium. The actual potential exhibits the same general features as those obtained in the bag calculation. If the bag pressure is used as a phenomenological parameter, rather than the value fixed by the superconducting energy density, the agreement is excellent. Numerically the actual problem was actually no more difficult than the bag calculation. The interaction between magnetic monopoles and antimonopoles in the superconducting vacuum state is similar to the interaction of heavy colored quarks in a flux-confining physical QCD vacuum state. This means that our results are probably a good indication of the general behavior of the QCD potential and of the reliability of the bag approximation in the calculation of this potential. Our results also show that the bag model is a good approximation to a dual superconductor. This indicates that a dual superconducting picture of QCD would lead to the same heavy-quark potential and perhaps retain more of the physics than the bag model.