Confining complex ghost degrees of freedom

TL;DR

This paper proves a theorem showing that non-local bosonic fields interacting with confining gauge fields have their degrees of freedom confined, significantly altering the mass spectrum, especially for complex conjugate mass modes.

Contribution

It introduces a general theorem demonstrating confinement of complex ghost degrees of freedom in non-local bosonic fields coupled to confining gauge theories.

Findings

Confinement applies to infinite excitations including ghosts.

The theorem affects models with complex conjugate mass modes.

Applicable to string field theory and Lee-Wick models.

Abstract

We show a theorem proving that a non-local bosonic field upon a covariant interaction with a confining gauge field undergoes the confinement of its degrees of freedom present in the free theory changing completely the physical mass spectrum following Kugo-Ojima criterion. This is applicable to an infinite number of excitations of the bosonic field including ghosts whereas we pay special attention to the modes with the complex conjugate masses, states appearing in the string field theory motivated infinite-derivative models. The same recipe will obviously work for the Lee-Wick models.