By using the method of center projection, the center vortex part of the gauge field is isolated and its propagator is evaluated in the center Landau gauge, which minimizes the open 3-dimensional Dirac volumes of nontrivial center links bounded by the closed 2-dimensional center vortex surfaces. The center field propagator is found to dominate the gluon propagator (in the Landau gauge) in the low momentum regime and to give rise to a power-law correction proportional to p(-2.9(1)) at high momentum. The screening mass of the center vortex field vanishes above the critical temperature of the deconfinement phase transition, which naturally explains the second order nature of this transition consistent with the vortex picture. Finally, the ghost propagator of the maximal center gauge is found to be infrared finite and, thus, shows that the coset fields play no role for confinement.