Charges, vortices and confinement

We study the confinement phase transition. We point out the relation between the decay rates of the Wilson loop integral, Osterwalder and Seiler's n-ality restriction, and Polyakov and 't Hooft's analysis of the center of the gauge group. Vortices and merons are analyzed as possible mechanisms to produce disorder in the center. We show how to realize the 't Hooft commutation relations, and we estimate the critical coupling for vortices to be in approximate agreement with the critical coupling determined by Callan, Dashen and Gross from the analysis of instantons.