Gluon and Faddeev--Popov ghost propagators in rotating background: An eigenfunction approach

Abstract

We construct the free gluon and Faddeev--Popov ghost propagators in rigidly rotating cylindrical coordinates using an eigenfunction approach within the Feynman gauge. Starting from the quadratic gauge-fixed QCD action, we derive the corresponding kinetic operators and obtain their spectral representations. For the gluon field, a circular polarization basis diagonalizes the vector wave operator, leading to polarization-dependent shifts in the orders of the radial Bessel functions. In the absence of radial boundaries, we explicitly recover the standard Minkowski propagator in inertial Cartesian coordinates, showing that the off-diagonal tensor components in the cylindrical basis have a geometrical origin. We then extend the construction to a finite-radius cylinder satisfying the causality condition $|Ω|R<1$, imposing relative boundary conditions on the gluon field and Dirichlet conditions on the ghosts. The resulting discrete transverse spectra involve both Dirichlet and Neumann eigenvalues for the gluon modes, from which we obtain explicit spectral representations of the propagators. Our results provide a consistent framework for perturbative QCD calculations in rotating geometries, retaining the angular-momentum, polarization, and boundary effects relevant to future studies of correlation functions and radiative corrections.