  It is suggested that the center vortex confinement mechanism, familiar in
hadronic physics, may have some relevance to high-T$_\text{c}$ phenomena. We
focus specifically on the transition from the superconducting phase to the
pseudogap phase. There is evidence of a vortex liquid in the latter phase, in
which the pairing responsible for superconductivity still exists, but
superconductivity itself does not. An analogy, drawn from particle physics, may
be the Higgs to confinement phase transition in an SU(N) gauge theory, where
the confined phase is a vortex liquid, and the Higgs phase is a phase of a
broken global $Z_N$ symmetry. We illustrate this idea with numerical
simulations of a spatially asymmetric U(1) gauge-Higgs model, with lattice
artifact monopoles suppressed. We show the existence of a Higgs
(superconductor) to confinement (vortex liquid) phase, explicitly identifying
vortices in lattice configurations generated in the confined phase, and showing
that they produce an area-law falloff in planar Wilson loops, which may be
measurable experimentally. The superconducting phase is a phase of broken
global Z$_\text{2}$ symmetry.
