Monopoles from quark condensates in QCD

Chiral monopoles are hedgehoglike structures in local chiral condensates in QCD. These monopoles are (i) made of quark and gluon fields; (ii) explicitly gauge-invariant; and (iii) they carry quantized and conserved chromomagnetic charge. We argue that the chiral condensate vanishes in a core of the chiral monopole while the density of these monopoles increases with temperature wiping out the quark condensate in quark-gluon plasma. We suggest that the dynamics of the chiral monopoles is responsible for the chiral symmetry restoration in high temperature phase of QCD. We also argue that the chiral monopoles are unlikely to be associated with confining degrees of freedom. In our approach the chiral symmetry restoration and the color deconfinement in QCD are not necessarily related to each other and the corresponding transitions may occur at different temperatures.