Alladi Ramakrishnan Hall

Topological defects in the Georgi-Machacek model: Domain walls, topological EW strings

Chandrasekhar Chatterjee

Keio University, Japan

We discuss topological defects in the Georgi-Machacek model in a hierarchical symmetry breaking in which extra triplets acquire vacuum expectation values before the doublet. We find a possibility of topologically stable non-Abelian domain walls and non-Abelian flux tubes (vortices or cosmic strings) in this model. In the limit of the vanishing U(1)Y gauge coupling in which the custodial symmetry becomes exact, the presence of a vortex spontaneously breaks the custodial symmetry, giving rise to S2 Nambu-Goldstone (NG) modes localized around the vortex corresponding to non- Abelian fluxes. Vortices are continuously degenerated by these degrees of freedom, thereby called non-Abelian. By taking into account the U(1)Y gauge coupling, the custodial symmetry is explicitly broken, the NG modes are lifted to become pseudo-NG modes, and all non-Abelian vortices fall into a topologically stable Z-string. Non-Abelian domain walls also break the custodial symmetry and are accompanied by localized S2 NG modes. Finally, we discuss the existence of domain wall solutions bounded by flux tubes, where their S2 NG modes match.