Pair Production in the Collapse of a Hopf Texture

Abstract

We consider the collapse of a global "Hopf" texture and examine the conjecture, disputed in the literature, that monopole-antimonopole pairs can be formed in the process. We show that such monopole-antimonopole pairs can indeed be nucleated in the course of texture collapse given appropriate initial conditions. The subsequent dynamics include the recombination and annihilation of the pair in a burst of outgoing scalar radiation.

Comments: 10 pages, 11 figures, MPEG movies available at http://godel.ph.utexas.edu/~ehirsch/hopf.html