TY - JOUR
T1 - Quantized non-Abelian monopoles on S3
AU - Maor, Irit
AU - Mathur, Harsh
AU - Vachaspati, Tanmay
N1 - Copyright:
Copyright 2007 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
PY - 2007/11/15
Y1 - 2007/11/15
N2 - A possible electric-magnetic duality suggests that the confinement of non-Abelian electric charges manifests itself as a perturbative quantum effect for the dual magnetic charges. Motivated by this possibility, we study vacuum fluctuations around a non-Abelian monopole-antimonopole pair treated as point objects with charges g=±n/2 (n=1,2,...), and placed on the antipodes of a three sphere of radius R. We explicitly find all the fluctuation modes by linearizing and solving the Yang-Mills equations about this background field on a three sphere. We recover, generalize, and extend earlier results, including those on the stability analysis of non-Abelian magnetic monopoles. We find that for g ≥ 1 monopoles there is an unstable mode that tends to squeeze magnetic flux in the angular directions. We sum the vacuum energy contributions of the fluctuation modes for the g=1/2 case and find oscillatory dependence on the cutoff scale. Subject to certain assumptions, we find that the contribution of the fluctuation modes to the quantum zero-point energy grows as ∼-R-2/3 and hence decays more slowly than the classical -R-1 Coulomb potential for large R. However, the growth of the zero-point energy does not agree with the linear growth expected if the monopoles are confined.
AB - A possible electric-magnetic duality suggests that the confinement of non-Abelian electric charges manifests itself as a perturbative quantum effect for the dual magnetic charges. Motivated by this possibility, we study vacuum fluctuations around a non-Abelian monopole-antimonopole pair treated as point objects with charges g=±n/2 (n=1,2,...), and placed on the antipodes of a three sphere of radius R. We explicitly find all the fluctuation modes by linearizing and solving the Yang-Mills equations about this background field on a three sphere. We recover, generalize, and extend earlier results, including those on the stability analysis of non-Abelian magnetic monopoles. We find that for g ≥ 1 monopoles there is an unstable mode that tends to squeeze magnetic flux in the angular directions. We sum the vacuum energy contributions of the fluctuation modes for the g=1/2 case and find oscillatory dependence on the cutoff scale. Subject to certain assumptions, we find that the contribution of the fluctuation modes to the quantum zero-point energy grows as ∼-R-2/3 and hence decays more slowly than the classical -R-1 Coulomb potential for large R. However, the growth of the zero-point energy does not agree with the linear growth expected if the monopoles are confined.
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U2 - 10.1103/PhysRevD.76.105013
DO - 10.1103/PhysRevD.76.105013
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:36249008593
SN - 1550-7998
VL - 76
JO - Physical Review D - Particles, Fields, Gravitation and Cosmology
JF - Physical Review D - Particles, Fields, Gravitation and Cosmology
IS - 10
M1 - 105013
ER -