Cosmic Strings Stabilized by Fermion Fluctuations

Abstract

We provide a thorough exposition of recent results on the quantum stabilization of cosmic strings. Stabilization occurs through the coupling to a heavy fermion doublet in a reduced version of the standard model. The study combines the vacuum polarization energy of fermion zero-point fluctuations and the binding energy of occupied energy levels, which are of the same order in a semi-classical expansion. Populating these bound states assigns a charge to the string. Strings carrying fermion charge become stable if the Higgs and gauge fields are coupled to a fermion that is less than twice as heavy as the top quark. The vacuum remains stable in the model, because neutral strings are not energetically favored. These findings suggest that extraordinarily large fermion masses or unrealistic couplings are not required to bind a cosmic string in the standard model.

Based on talk by HW at QFEXT 11 (Benasque, Spain), 15p, uses ws-ijmpcs.cls (incl)

References in corpus (7)

• Cosmic Strings and Superstrings
• Nonabelian Bosonic Currents in Cosmic Strings
• Stable charged cosmic strings
• Fermion Energies in the Background of a Cosmic String
• Vacuum Energies of Non--Abelian String--Configurations in 3+1 Dimensions
• Gauge Invariance and Vacuum Energies of Non-Abelian String-Configurations
• Energies of Quantum QED Flux Tubes

Cited by in corpus (2)

• Kink interactions in the (1+1)-dimensional ${\phi }^6$ model
• Kink excitation spectra in the (1+1)-dimensional ${\phi }^8$ model