2006/05/31 by M. Donaire, M Donaire
Physics and Astronomy · #Black Holes and Theoretical Physics #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Physics of Superconductivity and Magnetism #cond-mat.supr-con #hep-ph #hep-th
paper · pdf · doi:10.1088/0305-4470/39/48/012
published as J.Phys. A39 (2006) 15013-15056 · Corrections made on sections 4,5. Higher quality figures in published version
arxiv created 2006/11/06 · openalex publication_date 2006/11/15 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
We investigate the mechanism by which topological defects form in first-order phase transitions with a charged-order parameter. We show how thick superconductor vortices and heavy cosmic strings form by trapping of magnetic flux. In an external magnetic field, intermediate objects such as strips and membranes of magnetic flux and chains of single winding defects are produced. At non-zero temperature, a variety of spontaneous defects of different winding numbers arise. In cosmology, our results mean that the magnetic flux thermal fluctuations get trapped in a primordial multi-tension string network. The mechanism may also apply to the production of cosmic-like strings in brane collisions. In a thin type-I superconductor film, flux strips are found to be meta-stable while thick vortices are stable up to some critical value of the winding number which increases with the thickness of the film. In addition, a non-dissipative Josephson-like current is obtained across the strips of quantized magnetic flux.