Dynamics of Confined Monopoles and Similarities with Confined Quarks

Abstract

In this work, we study the annihilation of a pair of `t Hooft-Polyakov monopoles due to confinement by a string. We analyze the regime in which the scales of monopoles and strings are comparable. We compute the spectrum of the emitted gravitational waves and find it to agree with the previously calculated point-like case for wavelengths longer than the system width and before the collision. However, we observe that in a head-on collision, monopoles are never re-created. Correspondingly, not even once the string oscillates. Instead, the system decays into waves of Higgs and gauge fields. We explain this phenomenon by the loss of coherence in the annihilation process. Due to this, the entropy suppression makes the recreation of a monopole pair highly improbable. We argue that in a similar regime, analogous behaviour is expected for the heavy quarks connected by a QCD string. There too, instead of re-stretching a long string after the first collapse, the system hadronizes and decays in a high multiplicity of mesons and glueballs. We discuss the implications of our results.

11 pages, 7 figures, video with dynamics at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4IX2JFVpGk

References in corpus (4)

• The NANOGrav 12.5-year Data Set: Search For An Isotropic Stochastic Gravitational-Wave Background
• The International Pulsar Timing Array second data release: Search for an isotropic Gravitational Wave Background
• Entropy Bound and Unitarity of Scattering Amplitudes
• Primordial Black Holes from Confinement

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Well-separated soliton-antisoliton pairs with an adjoint Higgs field in 4D space