Manifestations of magnetic vortices in the equation of state of a Yang-Mills plasma

The vacuum of Yang-Mills theory contains singular stringlike objects identified with center (magnetic) vortices. Percolation of magnetic vortices is known to be responsible for the color confinement in the low-temperature phase of the theory. In our work, we study properties of the vortices at finite temperature using lattice simulations of SU(2) gauge theory. We show that magnetic vortices provide a numerically large contribution to thermodynamic quantities of the gluon plasma in Yang-Mills theory. In particular, we observe that in the deconfinement phase at temperatures T{sub c}