Black holes and the strong CP problem

Abstract

The strong CP problem is that SU (3) gauge field instantons naturally induce a CP violating term in the QCD Lagrangian which is constrained by experiment to be very small for no obvious reason. We show that this problem disappears if one assumes the existence of at least one black hole somewhere in the universe. The argument is reminiscent of Dirac’s argument for the quantization of charge, in which the existence of one monople anywhere in the universe suffices to require the quantization of electric charge everywhere. Comments are made regarding appearance of similar terms in spacetimes of general topology.