Excitations of isolated static charges in the charge $q=2$ abelian Higgs model

Abstract

We present lattice Monte Carlo evidence of stable excitations of isolated static charges in the Higgs phase of the charge $q=2$ abelian Higgs model. These localized excitations are excited states of the interacting fields surrounding the static charges. Since the $q=2$ abelian Higgs model is a relativistic version of the Landau-Ginzburg effective action of a superconductor, we conjecture that excited states of this kind might be relevant in a condensed matter context. Taken together with recent related work in SU(3) gauge Higgs theory, our result suggests that a massive fermion excitation spectrum may be a general feature of gauge Higgs theories.

Comments: 6 pages, 11 figures. v2: Version to appear in PRD