2023/05/16 by Mirjam Cvetič, Cvetič, Mirjam, Jonathan J. Heckman +5 · 2 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Black Holes and Theoretical Physics #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #FOS: Physical sciences #High Energy Physics - Phenomenology (hep-ph) #High Energy Physics - Theory (hep-th) #Quantum Electrodynamics and Casimir Effect
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2305.09665
openalex publication_date 2023/05/16 · openalex created_date 2023/05/19 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
The stringy realization of generalized symmetry operators involves wrapping "branes at infinity". We argue that in the case of continuous (as opposed to discrete) symmetries, the appropriate objects are fluxbranes. We use this perspective to revisit the phase structure of Verlinde's monopole, a proposed particle which is BPS when gravity is decoupled, but is non-BPS and metastable when gravity is switched on. Geometrically, this monopole is obtained from branes wrapped on locally stable but globally trivial cycles of a compactification geometry. The fluxbrane picture allows us to characterize electric (resp. magnetic) confinement (resp. screening) in the 4D theory as a result of monopole decay. In the presence of the fluxbrane, this decay also creates lower-dimensional fluxbranes, which in the field theory is interpreted as the creation of an additional topological field theory sector.