Speaker
Description
The Standard Model of particle physics provides a good approximation at low energy scales. In the early hot universe, however, it is assumed that there was a so-called grand unified theory, which unified the three fundamental forces of particle physics. However, all attempts to unify these three forces lead to a possible overabundance of ’t Hooft–Polyakov magnetic monopoles. But why magnetic monopoles haven’t been observed so far?
In my presentation, I will discuss the magnetic monopole problem and present one solution in more detail: monopoles connected by cosmic strings (Langacker and Pi, 1980). I will focus particularly on the “slingshot effect,” which describes monopoles traversing the boundary between Coulomb and confining phases. During this passage, the gauge field becomes confined within a cosmic string connected to the domain wall separating the two phases. This phenomenon, which may have occurred in the early universe, could leave observable imprints such as gravitational waves. Using numerical tools, we calculated the gravitational wave spectrum and made first estimates of the observability of the slingshot effect.