1995/06/27 by Douglas M. Eardley, Douglas Eardley, Gary T. Horowitz +3 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #Black Holes and Theoretical Physics #Cosmic string #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Dyon #Gauge theory #Higgs boson #Instanton #Magnetic monopole #Mathematical physics #Particle physics #Physics #Quantum mechanics #Relativity and Gravitational Theory #Scalar field #String (physics) #Theoretical physics #Topological defect #Topology (electrical circuits) #astro-ph #gr-qc #hep-th
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevlett.75.3390
published as Phys.Rev.Lett.75:3390-3393,1995 · 9 pages, no figures; one statement corrected and references added
arxiv created 1995/06/27 · openalex publication_date 1995/11/06 · arxiv updated 2009/11/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
It is shown that topologically stable cosmic strings can, in fact, appear to end or to break, even in theories without monopoles. This can occur whenever the spatial topology of the universe is nontrivial. For the case of Abelian-Higgs strings, we describe the gauge and scalar field configurations necessary for a string to end on a black hole. We give a lower bound for the rate at which a cosmic string will break via black hole pair production, using an instanton calculation based on the Euclidean C-metric.