Fractional electric charge and quark confinement

Owing to their fractional electric charges, quarks are blind to transformations that combine a color center phase with an appropriate electromagnetic one. Such transformations are part of a global $Z_6$-like center symmetry of the Standard Model that is lost when quantum chromodynamics (QCD) is treated as an isolated theory. This symmetry and the corresponding topological defects may be relevant to non-perturbative phenomena such as quark confinement, much like center symmetry and ordinary center vortices are in pure SU($N$) gauge theories. Here we report on our investigations of an analogous symmetry in a 2-color model with dynamical Wilson quarks carrying half-integer electric charge.