Confinement at Negative Curvature

by Victor Gorbenko

Wednesday Apr 22, 2026, 2:00 PM → 3:00 PM Europe/Zurich

500/1-001 - Main Auditorium (CERN)

I will discuss the progress on understanding the structure of confining flux tubes in QCD and related gauge theories. In the first part of the talk I will review prior results which use effective field theory techniques and compare them with the lattice data. In particular, I will emphasize a pseudoscalar massive mode which plays an important role in the flux tube dynamics. In the second part I will switch to very recent and ongoing work in which we place a gauge theory on hyperbolic space to regulate IR divergences. At large curvature radius we recover flat space. At small radius gauge theory is perturbative, however, flux is still confined to a line due to gravitational potential induced by curvature. By changing the radius we can interpolate between the two regimes without running into a phase transition.

Recording