The Shape of Confinement: Rethinking the QCD Mass Gap

Boris Kriger’s paper proposes that quark confinement is a topological necessity rather than a dynamical result of particle interactions. The author argues that the color field exists as a closed three-manifold with S^3 topology, meaning it has no boundary through which flux can escape to infinity. Because the internal energy budget of this system is strictly limited by the QCD scale Lambda_ QCD , no internal process possesses enough energy to break this structural closure. Consequently, the stability of the proton is guaranteed from within, while deconfinement into a quark-gluon plasma can only occur through external actions like extreme heat or density that exceed specific thresholds. This topological closure principle is presented as a universal rule, providing a structural link between the microscopic stability of nucleons and the cosmological stability of a closed universe.