Lattice gauge theory and gluon color-confinement in curved spacetime

TL;DR

This paper formulates lattice gauge theory in curved spacetime, demonstrating gluon confinement analytically and discussing fermion doubling, with prospects for numerical simulations of QCD in curved backgrounds.

Contribution

It introduces a discretized lattice gauge theory framework in curved spacetime, extending previous flat spacetime formulations and analyzing gluon confinement analytically.

Findings

Gluons are always color-confined in curved spacetime backgrounds.

The fermion-doubling problem is analyzed in the FRW metric.

Discussion of potential numerical implementations for lattice QCD in curved spacetime.

Abstract

The lattice gauge theory for curved spacetime is formulated. A discretized action is derived for both gluon and quark fields which reduces to the generally covariant form in the continuum limit. Using the Wilson action, it is shown analytically that for a general curved spacetime background, two propagating gluons are always color-confined. The fermion-doubling problem is discussed in the specific case of Friedman-Robertson-Walker metric. Lastly, we discussed possible future numerical implementation of lattice QCD in curved spacetime.