We suggest that the gauge-invariant hedgehoglike structures in the Wilson loops are physically interesting degrees of freedom in the Yang-Mills theory. The trajectories of these "hedgehog loops" are closed curves corresponding to center-valued (untraced) Wilson loops and are characterized by the center charge and winding number. We show numerically in the SU(2) Yang-Mills theory that the density of hedgehog structures in the thermal Wilson-Polyakov line is very sensitive to the finite-temperature phase transition. The (additively normalized) hedgehog line density behaves like an order parameter: the density is almost independent of the temperature in the confinement phase and changes substantially as the system enters the deconfinement phase. In particular, our results suggest that the (static) hedgehog lines may be relevant degrees of freedom around the deconfinement transition and thus affect evolution of the quark-gluon plasma in high-energy heavy-ion collisions.

We calculate the topological susceptibility of the Yang-Mills vacuum using the field correlator method. Our estimate for the SU (3) gauge group, χ 1/4 = 196(7) MeV, is in a very good agreement with the results of recent numerical simulations of the Yang-Mills theory on the lattice.

We study the structure of the confining string in Yang-Mills theory using the method of the field strength correlators. The method allows us to demonstrate that both the local fluctuations of the topological charge and the gluon condensate are suppressed in the vicinity of the string axis in agreement with results of lattice simulations.

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