Speaker
Description
We study the annihilation of a pair of ‘t Hooft-Polyakov monopoles due to confinement by a string. We analyze the regime in which the scales of monopoles and strings are comparable. We observe that in a head-on collision, monopoles are never recreated. Correspondingly, not even once the string oscillates. Instead, the system decays into waves of Higgs and gauge fields. We explain this phenomenon by the loss of coherence in the annihilation process. Due to this, the entropy suppression makes the recreation of a monopole pair highly improbable. We argue that in a similar regime, analogous behavior is expected for the heavy quarks connected by a QCD string. Instead of restretching a long string after the first collapse, the system hadronizes and decays in a high multiplicity of mesons and glueballs. We discuss the implications of our results.
