Cosmic strings, deformed lattices and spontaneous symmetry breaking

Abstract

External conditions have a dramatic impact on the way dynamical symmetry breaking occurs. In a curved background, the natural expectation is that curvature works toward the restoration of the internal symmetry. We show instead that, for topological defects, the competing action of the locally induced curvature and boundary conditions generated by the non-trivial topology allows configurations where symmetries can be spontaneously broken close to the core. Inspired by the effect of geometrical deformations on 2D lattices, we then propose a novel mechanism to induce a superconducting phase by triggering condensation along cosmic strings.