Published March 15, 1993
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Journal Article
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Decay of metastable topological defects
- Creators
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Preskill, John
- Vilenkin, Alexander
Abstract
We systematically analyze the decay of metastable topological defects that arise from the spontaneous breakdown of gauge or global symmetries. Quantum-mechanical tunneling rates are estimated for a variety of decay processes. The decay rate for a global string, vortex, domain wall, or kink is typically suppressed compared to the decay rate for its gauged counterpart. We also discuss the decay of global texture, and of semilocal and electroweak strings.
Additional Information
©1993 The American Physical Society Received 9 September 1992 This work was supported in part by DOE Contract No. DE-AC03-81-ER40050 and by NSF Contract No. 8605578. A.V. gratefully acknowledges the hospitality of Caltech, and thanks the Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Scholars program for financial support.Files
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Additional details
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- CaltechAUTHORS:PREprd93
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2006-10-16Created from EPrint's datestamp field
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2021-11-08Created from EPrint's last_modified field