Scattering off an SO(10) cosmic string

Abstract

The scattering of fermions from the abelian string arising during the phase transition $SO(10)\to SU(5)\times Z_2$ induced by the Higgs in the 126 representation is studied. Elastic cross-sections and baryon number violating cross-sections due to the coupling to gauge fields in the core of the string are computed by both a first quantised method and a perturbative second quantised method. The elastic cross-sections are found to be Aharonov-Bohm type. However, there is a marked asymmetry between the scattering cross-sections for left and right handed fields. The catalysis cross-sections are small, depending on the grand unified scale. If cosmic strings were observed our results could help tie down the underlying gauge group.

20 pages

References in corpus (1)

• SO(10) Cosmic Strings and SU(3) Color Cheshire Charge

Cited by in corpus (8)

• A Supersymmetric SO(10) Model with Inflation and Cosmic Strings
• Unification, Proton Decay and Topological Defects in non-SUSY GUTs with Thresholds
• Roadmap of left-right models based on GUTs
• Constraining Supersymmetric SO(10) Models Through Cosmology
• Threshold effects in SO(10) models with one intermediate breaking scale
• Realizing unification in two different SO(10) models with one intermediate breaking scale
• Cosmic Strings in Low Mass Higgs Cosmology
• Grand unified models and cosmology