Tunneling decay of self-gravitating vortices

¹ Groupe de Physique des Particules, Département de physique, Université de Montréal, C. P. 6128, Succursale Centre-ville, Montréal, Québec, Canada H3C 3J7
² Department of Physics, Ernest Rutherford Physics Building, McGill University, 3600 rue University, Montréal, Québec, Canada H3A 2T8
³ Center for Quantum Spacetime, Sogang University, Seoul 04107, Korea
⁴ Department of Physics, Sogang University, Seoul 04107, Korea
⁵ Department of Physics, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Mumbai 400076, India
⁶ Leung Center for Cosmology and Particle Astrophysics, National Taiwan University, Taipei 10617, Taiwan
⁷ Asia Pacific Center for Theoretical Physics, and Department of Physics, Pohang University of Science and Technology, Pohang 37673, Korea

^* e-mail: eric.dupuis.1@umontreal.ca
^** e-mail: yan.gobeil@mail.mcgill.ca
^*** e-mail: bhl@sogang.ac.kr
^**** e-mail: warrior@sogang.ac.kr
^† e-mail: richard.mackenzie@umontreal.ca
^‡ e-mail: paranj@lps.umontreal.ca
^§ e-mail: yajnik@iitb.ac.in
^¶ e-mail: innocent.yeom@gmail.com

Published online: 9 January 2018

Abstract

We investigate tunneling decay of false vortices in the presence of gravity, in which vortices are trapped in the false vacuum of a theory of scalar electrodynamics in three dimensions. The core of the vortex contains magnetic flux in the true vacuum, while outside the vortex is the appropriate topologically nontrivial false vacuum. We numerically obtain vortex solutions which are classically stable; however, they could decay via tunneling. To show this phenomenon, we construct the proper junction conditions in curved spacetime. We find that the tunneling exponent for the vortices is half that for Coleman-de Luccia bubbles and discuss possible future applications.