Confined Magnetic Monopoles in Dense QCD

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates analytically that magnetic monopoles can be identified as kink-antikink pairs on non-Abelian strings in dense QCD, revealing their existence in a non-Abelian Yang-Mills context.

Contribution

It provides the first analytic proof that magnetic monopoles are inherent to non-Abelian Yang-Mills theories in dense QCD, via the study of non-Abelian strings and their world-sheet dynamics.

Findings

Magnetic monopoles correspond to kink-antikink pairs on non-Abelian strings.

The effective world-sheet theory is a CP(2) model capturing monopole dynamics.

Monopoles are shown to exist in a highly quantum regime within dense QCD.

Abstract

Non-Abelian strings exist in the color-flavor locked phase of dense QCD. We show that kinks appearing in the world-sheet theory on these strings, in the form of the kink-antikink bound pairs, are the magnetic monopoles --- descendants of the 't Hooft-Polyakov monopoles surviving in such a special form in dense QCD. Our consideration is heavily based on analogies and inspiration coming from certain supersymmetric non-Abelian theories. This is the first ever analytic demonstration that objects unambiguously identifiable as the magnetic monopoles are "native" to non-Abelian Yang-Mills theories (albeit our analysis extends only to the phase of the monopole confinement and has nothing to say about their condensation). Technically our demonstration becomes possible due to the fact that low-energy dynamics of the non-Abelian strings in dense QCD is that of the orientational zero modes. It is described by an effective two-dimensional CP(2) model on the string world sheet. The kinks in this model representing confined magnetic monopoles are in a highly quantum regime.