Quantum energies of BPS vortices in $D=2+1$ and $D=3+1$

Abstract

We consider vortices in scalar electrodynamics and compute the leading quantum correction to their energies for the BPS case of identical classical masses of the Higgs and gauge fields. In particular, we focus on the winding number $n$ dependence of these corrections, from which we can extract the binding energies of configurations with larger $n$. For both dimensionalities, $D=2+1$ and $D=3+1$, we find that quantum corrections are negative and scale approximately linearly with $n$, so that combined vortices are favored over isolated ones.

Comments: 18 pages, typos corrected to match journal version