Scattering of massless and massive monopoles in an SU(N) theory

Abstract

We use the moduli space approximation to study the time evolution of magnetically charged configurations in a theory with an SU(N+2) gauge symmetry spontaneously broken to U(1) x SU(N) x U(1). We focus on configurations containing two massive and N-1 massless monopoles. The latter do not appear as distinct objects, but instead coalesce into a cloud of non-Abelian field. We find that at large times the cloud and the massless particles are decoupled, with separately conserved energies. The interaction between them occurs through a scattering process in which the cloud, acting very much like a thin shell, contracts and eventually bounces off the cores of the massive monopoles. The strength of the interaction, as measured, e.g., by the amount of energy transfer, tends to be greatest if the shell is small at the time that it overlaps the massive cores. We also discuss the corresponding behavior for the case of the SU(3) multimonopole solutions studied by Dancer.

32 pages, 7 figures

Cited by in corpus (7)

• Magnetic Monopole Dynamics, Supersymmetry, and Duality
• Domain Walls with Non-Abelian Clouds
• DLCQ of Fivebranes, Large N Screening, and L^2 Harmonic Forms on Calabi Manifolds
• Massless monopoles and the moduli space approximation
• Interactions of massless monopole clouds
• Massless monopole clouds and electric-magnetic duality
• Constraining the Existence of Magnetic Monopoles by Dirac-Dual Electric Charge Renormalization Effect Under the Planck Scale Limit