BPS strings and the stability of the asymptotic Casimir law in adjoint flavor-symmetric YMH models

Abstract

We investigate an effective flavor-symmetric Yang-Mills-Higgs model with $N^2-1$ adjoint scalar fields. We find a set of BPS equations that provide vortex solutions and calculate their energies for arbitrary representations. We show that, for a given N-ality $k$, the energy of the corresponding antisymmetric representation is the lowest. This completes the proof that this model is able to reproduce a Casimir law for the string tension at asymptotic distances.

Comments: 16 pages, 4 figures