Confining complex ghost degrees of freedom

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 infinitederivative models. The same recipe will obviously work for the Lee-Wick models. (c) 2023 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V.

Automated summary

We present a theorem demonstrating that the non-local bosonic field, when interacting covariantly with a confining gauge field, undergoes a confinement of its degrees of freedom, leading to a complete change in the physical mass spectrum according to the Kugo-Ojima criterion. This theorem applies to an infinite number of excitations of the bosonic field, including ghosts, with a specific focus on modes exhibiting complex conjugate masses, which are prevalent in infinitederivative models motivated by string field theory. The same approach can be applied to Lee-Wick models as well.