Center vortices and monopoles without lattice Gribov copies Original Research Article

We construct a smooth gauge for the adjoint field which is free of ambiguities on the lattice. In this Laplacian Center Gauge, center vortices and monopoles appear together as local gauge defects. A numerical study of center vortices in SU(2) and SU(3) supports equality of the ZN and SU(N) string tensions in the continuum limit, and only then.