TY - JOUR
T1 - Enhanced baryon number violation due to cosmic strings
AU - Alford, M. G.
AU - March-Russell, John
AU - Wilczek, Frank
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was partially supported by NSF grant PHY-87-14654. MGA and JMR wish to thank the Institute for Theoretical Physics, Santa Barbara, for its hospitality, and FW thanks the ITP for support during the early stages of this work. We thank Sidney Coleman and Alexander Vilenkin for discussions.
PY - 1989/12/11
Y1 - 1989/12/11
N2 - When quarks and leptons propagate in the background of a grand unified cosmic string, various baryon number violating processes can occur. We argue that, because of the long-range pure gauge field that surrounds the string, the cross sections for these processes are generically enhanced by large factors over the naive, geometric, cross section. We explicitly calculate the cross section for quark to lepton transitions in a simplified model and find that it is enhanced by a factor of up to (Λ/Mproton)2 where Λ is the grand unification scale. In an appendix we discuss the possible boundary conditions for the fermionic wave functions, and calculate the correct choice of boundary condition for our model system.
AB - When quarks and leptons propagate in the background of a grand unified cosmic string, various baryon number violating processes can occur. We argue that, because of the long-range pure gauge field that surrounds the string, the cross sections for these processes are generically enhanced by large factors over the naive, geometric, cross section. We explicitly calculate the cross section for quark to lepton transitions in a simplified model and find that it is enhanced by a factor of up to (Λ/Mproton)2 where Λ is the grand unification scale. In an appendix we discuss the possible boundary conditions for the fermionic wave functions, and calculate the correct choice of boundary condition for our model system.
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U2 - 10.1016/0550-3213(89)90096-5
DO - 10.1016/0550-3213(89)90096-5
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:0001284843
VL - 328
SP - 140
EP - 158
JO - Nuclear Physics B
JF - Nuclear Physics B
SN - 0550-3213
IS - 1
ER -