Dynamics of Confined Monopoles and Similarities with Confined Quarks

TL;DR

This paper investigates monopole-antimonopole annihilation under confinement, revealing that the system decays into field waves without re-creating monopoles, with implications for QCD string behavior.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of monopole annihilation dynamics with comparable monopole and string scales, highlighting the decay into field waves and the suppression of monopole re-creation.

Findings

Gravitational wave spectrum matches point-like case for long wavelengths

Monopoles are not re-created after collision

System decays into Higgs and gauge field waves

Abstract

In this work, we study the annihilation of a pair of `t Hooft-Polyakov monopoles due to confinement by a string. We analyze the regime in which the scales of monopoles and strings are comparable. We compute the spectrum of the emitted gravitational waves and find it to agree with the previously calculated point-like case for wavelengths longer than the system width and before the collision. However, we observe that in a head-on collision, monopoles are never re-created. Correspondingly, not even once the string oscillates. Instead, the system decays into waves of Higgs and gauge fields. We explain this phenomenon by the loss of coherence in the annihilation process. Due to this, the entropy suppression makes the recreation of a monopole pair highly improbable. We argue that in a similar regime, analogous behaviour is expected for the heavy quarks connected by a QCD string. There too, instead of re-stretching a long string after the first collapse, the system hadronizes and decays in a high multiplicity of mesons and glueballs. We discuss the implications of our results.