Vacuum Structure and Global Strings with Conical Singularities

TL;DR

This paper investigates the vacuum configurations and global cosmic strings in a scalar field theory on manifolds with conical singularities, revealing an inhomogeneous vacuum and potential string formation at singularities.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed analysis of vacuum structures and string formation mechanisms in the presence of conical singularities using heat-kernel methods.

Findings

Identification of an inhomogeneous vacuum state with minimum energy

Proposal that low-energy global strings are likely generated at conical singularities

Application of heat-kernel and ζ-function regularization techniques

Abstract

Vacuum structure and global cosmic strings are analyzed in the effective theory of self-interacting O(2) scalar fields on (3+1)-manifolds with conical singularities. In the context of one-loop effective action computed by heat-kernel methods with $\zeta$-function regularization, we find an inhomogeneous vacuum of minimum energy and suggest some reason why low-energy global strings are likely to be generated at the conical singularities.