Evidence for three-fold azimuthal structure in QCD chromoelectric flux tubes

We report evidence for non-cylindrical azimuthal structure in QCD chromoelectric flux tubes, obtained through reanalysis of published lattice data. Azimuthal Fourier decomposition of two-dimensional curl(E) maps from pure SU(3) simulations reveals a statistically significant excess at mode n = 3 relative to a cylindrical null model: +113% at β = 6.240 and +94% at β = 6.769. The excess is positive in 37 of 42 radial bins across both lattice spacings (sign test p= 4.4 ×10−7). Independently, longitudinal flux tube profiles from full QCD simulations show sinusoidal modulation inconsistent with a constant model (p = 0.002), with a best-fit wavelength λ ≈0.93 fm. These results suggest that QCD flux tubes possess a helical chromoelectric field with three-fold (C3) rotational symmetry, a structure predicted by the Entanglement-Driven Cosmological Expansion (EDCE) framework from the geometry of Planck-scale triangular cells. We discuss implications for flux tube models and propose dedicated lattice measurements to confirm the signal.