Appears in collection : 100 (102!) Years of the Ising Model

Understanding the physical mechanisms behind confinement is one of the most important open problems in Lattice Gauge Theories (LGTs). In this talk we discuss two exemplary applications of the Ising model to this problem. In the first example we study the quark-antiquark correlator in the LGT with SU(2) gauge symmetry. We show that at high temperature, in the neighborhood of the deconfinement transition but still in the confining phase, this correlator can be mapped into the spin spin correlator of the Ising model and exploit the precise knowledge we have of this correlator to predict the behaviour of the confining string. In the second we study the behaviour of interfaces in the 3d Ising model which, using duality, can be mapped into the behaviour of a (closed) confining string.