Phase transition induced by cosmic strings

Abstract

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Stability of false vacuum in supersymmetric theories with cosmic strings

“…As long as this value remains small, the effective mass squared for the h in Eq. (30) remains positive. This makes jV 1 i a valid local minimum and admits a vortex sector jV ðstringÞ 1 i.…”

“…Specifically, when a cosmic string is present in a false vacuum, such a local minimum can be rendered unstable against decay to a vacuum of lower energy [28,29]. This process was studied by one of us [30] in the context of phase transitions in grand unified theory models. It was shown that generically, the presence of the cosmic string entailed the consequence that false vacuum would ''roll over'' smoothly to the true vacuum without recourse to quantum tunneling.…”

Tunneling decay of false vortices with gravitation

“…Decaying cosmic strings, which generalize the false vortex in 3 + 1 dimensions, were also studied in earlier work [32]. For the classical instability the effect was first investigated in the context of Grand Unified Theories in [33]. In those studies, cosmic strings are analogous to vortex lines in type II superconductors or in superfluid liquid helium.…”

Gravitational correction to fuzzy string in metastable brane configuration

“…The idea of the inhomogeneous decay of false vacua via solitons was initially pointed out by [19][20][21][22]. Then, in [23][24][25][26][27][28][29], applications to phenomenological model building were discussed in the context of field theories.…”