Self-gravitating line sources of weak hypercharge

TL;DR

This paper investigates how the Cremmer-Scherk mechanism influences low energy string theory by coupling gauge fields, resulting in exact self-gravitating solutions with massive dual fields and non-perturbative modes traveling at light speed.

Contribution

It introduces a novel coupling of antisymmetric gauge potentials to hypercharge in string theory, revealing exact solutions with unique massive and wave modes.

Findings

Existence of exact self-gravitating solutions with line sources

Massive dual fields with non-perturbative longitudinal modes

Propagation of modes at the speed of light along line sources

Abstract

We explore the role of the Cremmer-Scherk mechanism in the context of low energy effective string theory by coupling the antisymmetric 3-form gauge potential to an Abelian gauge potential carrying weak hypercharge. The theory admits a class of exact self-gravitating solutions in the spontaneously broken phase in which the dual fields acquire massive perturbative modes. Despite the massive nature of these fields they admit non-perturbative progressive longitudinal modes that together with pp-type gravitational waves travel in a direction of a line source at the speed of light.