The Dual Formulation of Cosmic Strings and Vortices

TL;DR

This paper develops a dual formulation for various types of cosmic strings using path integral methods, representing Goldstone bosons and axions with antisymmetric tensor fields, and describing monopoles attached to strings.

Contribution

It introduces a novel dual formulation for global, axionic, and local strings, incorporating monopoles, using path integral formalism and antisymmetric tensor fields.

Findings

Dual formulation describes strings as sources for tensor fields

Monopoles attached to local strings are incorporated in the dual framework

Provides insights into the field-theoretic description of cosmic strings

Abstract

We study four dimensional systems of global, axionic and local strings. By using the path integral formalism, we derive the dual formulation of these systems, where Goldstone bosons, axions and missive vector bosons are described by antisymmetric tensor fields, and strings appear as a source for these tensor fields. We show also how magnetic monopoles attached to local strings are described in the dual formulation. We conclude with some remarks.