Massive photons and Dirac monopoles: electric condensate and magnetic confinement

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that massive photons can coexist with Dirac monopoles through a generalized Julia-Toulouse approach, leading to magnetic confinement via physical vortices instead of Dirac strings, and deriving the Proca theory as an effective low-energy description.

Contribution

It introduces a novel application of the generalized Julia-Toulouse approach to unify massive photons with Dirac monopoles, providing a new perspective on magnetic confinement mechanisms.

Findings

Massive photons coexist with Dirac monopoles in this framework.

Magnetic defects are confined by physical vortices rather than Dirac strings.

The Proca theory emerges as a low-energy effective theory from this approach.

Abstract

We use the generalized Julia-Toulouse approach (GJTA) for condensation of topological currents (charges or defects) to argue that massive photons can coexist consistently with Dirac monopoles. The Proca theory is obtained here via GJTA as a low energy effective theory describing an electric condensate and the mass of the vector boson is responsible for generating a Meissner effect which confines the magnetic defects in monopole-antimonopole pairs connected by physical open magnetic vortices described by Dirac brane invariants, instead of Dirac strings.