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Title: Fermions and magnetic monopoles

Thesis/Dissertation ·
OSTI ID:6447346

This work is a study of the interactions of fermions with magnetic monopoles. Using explicit solutions of the Dirac equation in some external monopole fields, we examine the effects of magnetic monopoles on the Fermi vacuum. For point monopoles, we exhibit the existence of a degenerate set of vacua differing by arbitrary finite electric charges. Regular monopoles, of the t'Hooft-Polyakov type, are shown to trigger a vacuum instability when fermions are appropriately coupled to a scalar field. Finally, a semiclassical quantization of dyons interacting with fermions is attempted. For massless fermions, the vacuum is also unstable, and we are led to speculate that the standard dyon spectrum is drastically altered by the presence of light fermions.

Research Organization:
Princeton Univ., NJ (USA)
OSTI ID:
6447346
Resource Relation:
Other Information: Thesis (Ph. D.)
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English