MODEL DEPENDENCE OF BARYON DECAY ENHANCEMENT BY COSMIC STRINGS

TY - JOUR

T1 - MODEL DEPENDENCE OF BARYON DECAY ENHANCEMENT BY COSMIC STRINGS

AU - Fewster, C J

AU - Kay, Bernard

PY - 1993/6/28

Y1 - 1993/6/28

N2 - It is known that GUT cosmic strings carrying fractional flux can catalyse baryon decay processes with strong interaction cross sections. We address the question of how the wave-function amplification factors employed in the analysis of this effect depend on the details of the distribution of the fields making up the string core, focusing on a class of models for which the relevant fields behave as a single effective magnetic flux distribution. We introduce a scattering length formalism both to understand better the mechanism of the amplification process and to permit the efficient computation of the amplification factors for any given flux distribution. We find that single-signed flux distributions generically yield the amplification factors arrived at in earlier work on enhanced baryon decay catalysis on the basis of some simple solvable model flux distributions. However, we also show that there are flux distributions (which involve at least one sign change) which, were they to arise as the effective flux distribution of a cosmic string, would lead to amplification factors differing greatly from those of single-signed distributions of the same total flux.

AB - It is known that GUT cosmic strings carrying fractional flux can catalyse baryon decay processes with strong interaction cross sections. We address the question of how the wave-function amplification factors employed in the analysis of this effect depend on the details of the distribution of the fields making up the string core, focusing on a class of models for which the relevant fields behave as a single effective magnetic flux distribution. We introduce a scattering length formalism both to understand better the mechanism of the amplification process and to permit the efficient computation of the amplification factors for any given flux distribution. We find that single-signed flux distributions generically yield the amplification factors arrived at in earlier work on enhanced baryon decay catalysis on the basis of some simple solvable model flux distributions. However, we also show that there are flux distributions (which involve at least one sign change) which, were they to arise as the effective flux distribution of a cosmic string, would lead to amplification factors differing greatly from those of single-signed distributions of the same total flux.

KW - FERMIONS

KW - SCATTERING

KW - FIELD

U2 - doi:10.1016/0550-3213(93)90618-Y

DO - doi:10.1016/0550-3213(93)90618-Y

M3 - Article

SN - 1873-1562

VL - 399

SP - 89

EP - 110

JO - Nuclear Physics B

JF - Nuclear Physics B

IS - 1

ER -