Monopoles, abelian projection, and gauge invariance

A direct connection is proved between the non-Abelian Bianchi Identities (NABI's) and the Abelian Bianchi identities for the 't Hooft tensor. As a consequence, the existence of a nonzero magnetic current is related to the violation of the NABI's and is a gauge-invariant property. The construction allows us to show that not all Abelian projections can be used to expose monopoles in lattice configurations: each field configuration with nonzero magnetic charge identifies its natural projection, up to gauge transformations which tend to unity at large distances. It is shown that the so-called maximal-Abelian gauge is a legitimate choice. It is also proven, starting from the NABI, that monopole condensation is a physical gauge-invariant phenomenon, independent of the choice of the Abelian projection. © 2010 The American Physical Society.