Related papers: Generic Current-Carrying Strings
Semilocal and electroweak strings are well-known to be unstable against unwinding by the condensation of the second Higgs component in their cores. A large class of current models of dark matter contains dark scalar fields coupled to the…
We show that the Z-strings of the standard electroweak theory can be stabilized by strong external magnetic fields, provided that $\beta^{1/2} \equiv M_H/M_Z\leq 1$, where $M_H$ and $M_Z$ are the Higgs and Z masses. The magnetic fields…
We present a systematic determination of the order hbar fermionic energy shift when an electroweak string is perturbed. We show that the combined effect of zero modes, bound states and continuum states is to lower the total fermionic ground…
We show that stable local cosmic strings are a generic prediction of supersymmetric models where supersymmetry is broken at scales within a few orders of magnitude of the weak scale and is fed down to the observable sector by gauge…
The standard electroweak theory admits a string solution, the Z string, in which only the electrically neutral Higgs fields are excited. This solution is unstable at zero temperature: Z strings decay by exciting charged Higgs modes. In the…
We uncover a rich microphysical structure for SO(10) cosmic strings. For the abelian string the electroweak symmetry is restored around it in a region depending on the electroweak scale. A rich structure of nonabelian strings is found. Some…
If cosmic strings are present at the electroweak phase transition, they can act as seeds on which bubbles of true vacuum nucleate. We explore the nature of such a phase transition, in particular the wall velocity and thickness of the…
The relevant characteristic features, including energy per unit length and tension, of a cosmic string carrying massless fermionic currents in the framework of the Witten model in the neutral limit are derived through quantization of the…
It is shown that it is possible for bound fermions on a cosmic string to form a superconducting state. Due to the attractive force between them, particles moving in opposite directions along the string form bound pairs. This involves a…
The Higgs quartic coupling has now been indirectly measured at the electroweak scale. Assuming no new low-scale physics, its running is known and, together with gauge and Yukawa couplings, it is a crucial new piece of information…
In the standard model, stabilization of a classically unstable cosmic string may occur through the quantum fluctuations of a heavy fermion doublet. We review numerical results from a semiclassical expansion in a reduced version of the…
It is shown that in models including the standard electroweak theory and for some particular values of the underlying parameters, electric currents can be spontaneously generated in cosmic strings, without the need of any external field…
Standard theories of electroweak interactions are based on the concept of a gauge symmetry broken by the Higgs mechanism. If they are placed in an environment with a sufficiently high temperature, the symmetry gets restored. It turns out…
The Cremmer-Scherk mechanism is generalised in a non-Abelian context. In the presence of the Higgs scalars of the standard model it is argued that fields arising from the low energy effective string action may contribute to the mass…
We discuss massless and massive neutrino zero modes in the background of an electroweak string. We argue that the eventual absence of the neutrino zero mode implies the existence of topologically stable strings where the required…
We give a detailed stability analysis of the Z-string in the standard electroweak model. We identify the mode that determines the stability of the string and numerically map the region of parameter space where the string is stable. For…
The Standard Model is the low-energy limit of a microscopic theory which includes extra dimensions and new symmetries. A part of my thesis consisted in constructing a new class of models with two extra dimensions. We showed that these…
We discuss the possibility of breaking the electroweak symmetry in theories with extra dimensions via boundary conditions, without a physical Higgs scalar in the spectrum. In these models the unitarity violation scale can be delayed via the…
We discuss an extension of the standard model by fields not charged under standard model gauge symmetry in which the electroweak symmetry breaking is driven by the Higgs quartic coupling itself without the need for a negative mass term in…
We show that if the Standard Model gauge fields and fermions propagate in extra dimenions, a composite Higgs field with the correct quantum number can arise naturally as a bound state due to the strong gauge interactions in higher…