Volume-Independent Spectral Gap for Strong-Coupling Lattice Gauge Theory via Poincaré-Dobrushin Machinery

DRAFT version. This is an advanced draft and remains subject to revision. The continuum Yang-Mills mass gap is not claimed as fully proved; the paper establishes strong-coupling lattice gap machinery and formulates the continuum transfer as a conditional RG/OS-transfer problem. We prove a volume-independent spectral gap for SU(N) lattice gauge theory in the strong-coupling regime using Holley–Stroock and Dobrushin–Zegarlinski tensorisation. For SU(2) in d=4 the tanh-based threshold is β 0 for SU(2) block-spin kernel. Minor: Bougerol–Lacroix (1985) reference added. Minor: Duplicate label fix (eq:typical-set). Changes in Version 2.0 (March 2026) Critical: Fixed \thanks placement (was outside \author group).