The Gravity of Dark Vortices: Effective Field Theory for Branes and Strings Carrying Localized Flux

Understand

A Nielsen-Olesen vortex usually sits in an environment that expels the flux that is confined to the vortex, so flux is not present both inside and outside.

• We construct vortices for which this is not true, where the flux carried by the vortex also permeates the `bulk' far from the vortex.
• The idea is to mix the vortex's internal gauge flux with an external flux using off-diagonal kinetic mixing.
• Such `dark' vortices could play a phenomenological role in models with both cosmic strings and a dark gauge sector.