Centre Vortex Visualiser

An interactive visualiser for centre vortices in SU(3) lattice QCD, rendered in four dimensions.

Centre vortices are coherent, two-dimensional surfaces of fluctuating gluon flux in the QCD vacuum. On the lattice they are identified after maximal centre gauge fixing and centre projection, and stored as collections of Surface Elements: elementary square tiles on the 4D hypercubic lattice. This program loads those elements from .surf files and lets you explore them as a genuine 4D object.

What makes it 4D?

The data lives in four-dimensional spacetime (x, y, z, t). Rather than collapsing the time direction, this visualiser:

• Projects 4D to 3D with a perspective divide on the fourth (w) coordinate, the same trick used to render 4D objects like the tesseract.
• Lets you rotate in all six rotation planes: the familiar XY, XZ, YZ, and the "4D" XW, YW, ZW planes that mix space and time.
• Shows a live orientation widget in the corner so you always know which way the axes point.

Features

• Three viewing modes: a reference hypercube, the full vortex content, and time slices with orientation cone markers.
• Periodic boundary handling via the minimum image convention: vortices wrap correctly around the lattice edges.
• Multi-window synchronisation: open several configurations side by side and they share the same perspective.