Certain gauge theories with superfluidity, such as dense QCD, exhibit nontrivial Aharonov-Bohm (AB) phases around vortices, or anyonic particle-vortex statistics, in the Higgs regime. There has been a debate on whether this nontrivial AB phase implies a Higgs-confinement transition even with fundamental matters. In this seminar, we address this question in favor of Higgs-confinement continuity. By performing explicit calculations in relevant lattice models, we demonstrate how the AB phase realizes the continuity between the confining and Higgs regimes. In particular, this result supports the possibility of the quark-hadron continuity scenario.
This talk is based on arXiv:2303.02129 [hep-th].