Stable charged cosmic strings

Abstract

We study the quantum stabilization of a cosmic string by a heavy fermion doublet in a reduced version of the standard model. We show that charged strings, obtained by populating fermionic bound state levels, become stable if the electro--weak bosons are coupled to a fermion that is less than twice as heavy as the top quark. This result suggests that extraordinarily large fermion masses or unrealistic couplings are not required to bind a cosmic string in the standard model. Numerically we find the most favorable string profile to be a simple "trough" in the Higgs vev of radius $\approx 10^{-18}\mathrm{m}$. The vacuum remains stable in our model, because neutral strings are not energetically favored.

5 pages, 3 figures, version to be published in Phys. Rev. Lett

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Cited by in corpus (14)

• Fermion Energies in the Background of a Cosmic String
• Stabilisation of semilocal strings by dark scalar condensates
• Spectral Methods for Coupled Channels with a Mass Gap
• Quantum Stabilization of a Closed Nielsen-Olesen String
• Isospin Invariance and the Vacuum Polarization Energy of Cosmic Strings
• Quantum Stabilization of Cosmic Strings
• SU(2) Chern-Simons Theory Coupled to Competing Scalars
• Electroweak strings with dark scalar condensates and their (in)stability
• Quantum Energy Density of Cosmic Strings with Nonzero Radius
• Immortality through the dark forces: Dark-charge primordial black holes as dark matter candidates
• Quantum stabilization of a hedgehog type of cosmic string
• Cosmic Strings Stabilized by Quantum Fluctuations
• Cosmic Strings Stabilized by Fermion Fluctuations
• Massive Dirac states bound to vortices by a boson-fermion interaction