Fractional Vortices and Lumps

Understand

We study what might be called fractional vortices, vortex configurations with the minimum winding from the viewpoint of their topological stability, but which are characterized by various notable substructures in the transverse energy distribution.

• The fractional vortices occur in diverse Abelian or non-Abelian generalizations of the Higgs model.
• The global and local features characterizing these are studied, and we identify the two crucial ingredients for their occurrence - the vacuum degeneracy leading to non-trivial vacuum moduli M, and the BPS nature of the vortices.
• Fractional vortices are further classified into two kinds.