Magnetic monopole loops supported by a meron pair as the quark confiner

We give an analytical solution representing circular magnetic monopole loops joining a pair of merons in the four-dimensional Euclidean SU(2) YangMills theory. This is achieved by solving the differential equation for the adjoint color (magnetic monopole) field in the two–meron background field within the recently developed reformulation of the Yang-Mills theory. Our analytical solution corresponds to the numerical solution found by Montero and Negele on a lattice. This result strongly suggests that a meron pair is the most relevant quark confiner in the original Yang-Mills theory, as Callan, Dashen and Gross suggested long ago.