Instabilities of Electroweak Strings

Abstract

We investigate the instabilities of low winding number electroweak strings using standard numerical techniques of linear algebra. For strings of unit winding we are able to confirm and extend existing calculations of the unstable region in the ($m_H/m_W,{\sin }^2{\theta }_W$) plane. For strings of higher winding number we map the unstable regions for the various decay modes.

Comments: Latex, 11 pages, 1 uuencoded figure