London relation and fluxoid quantization for monopole currents in U(1) lattice gauge theory.

We explore the analogy between quark confinement and the Meissner effect in superconductors. We measure the response of color-magnetic “supercurrents” from Dirac magnetic monopoles to the presence of a static quark-antiquark pair in fourdimensional U(1) lattice gauge theory. Our results indicate that in the confined phase these currents screen the color-electric flux due to the quarks in an electric analogy of the Meissner effect. We show that U(1) lattice gauge theory obeys both a dual London equation and an electric fluxoid quantization condition.