Chiral mass-gap in curved space.
We discuss a new type of QCD phenomenon induced in curved space. In the QCD vacuum, a mass-gap of Dirac fermions is attributed to the spontaneous breaking of chiral symmetry. If the curvature is positive large, the chiral condensate melts but a chiral invariant mass-gap can still remain, which we name the chiral gap effect in curved space. This leads to decoupling of quark deconfinement which implies a view of black holes surrounded by a first-order QCD phase transition.