Magnetic Monopoles / Edition 1

by Yakov M. Shnir

Overview

“One would be surprised if Nature had made no use of it.” P.A.M. Dirac According to some dictionaries, one meaning of the notion of “beauty” is “symmetry”. Probably, beauty is not entirely “in the eye of the beholder”. It seemstoberelatedtothesymmetryof theobject.Fromaphysicalviewpoint, this definition is very attractive: it allows us to describe a central concept of theoretical physics over the last two centuries as being a quest for higher symmetry of Nature. The more symmetric the theory, the more beautiful it looks. Unfortunately, our imperfect (at least at low-energy scale) world is full of nasty broken symmetries. This has impelled physicists to try to understand how this happens. In some cases, it is possible to reveal the mechanism of violationandhowthesymmetrymayberecovered;thenourpictureofNature becomes a bit more beautiful. One of the problems of the broken symmetry that we see is that, while there are electric charges in our world, their counterparts, magnetic mo- poles, have not been found. Thus, in the absence of the monopoles, the s- metry between electric and magnetic quantities is lost. Can this symmetry be regained? In the history of theoretical physics, the hypothesis about the possible existence of a magnetic monopole has no analogy. There is no other purely theoretical construction that has managed not only to survive, without any experimental evidence, in the course of more than a century, but has also remained the focus of intensive research by generations of physicists.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783642064487
Publisher:	Springer Berlin Heidelberg
Publication date:	11/19/2010
Series:	Theoretical and Mathematical Physics
Edition description:	Softcover reprint of hardcover 1st ed. 2005
Pages:	532
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.04(d)

Table of Contents

Dirac Monopole.- Magnetic Monopole in Classical Theory.- The Electron-Monopole System:Quantum-Mechanical Interaction.- Topological Roots of the Abelian Monopole.- Abelian Monopole: Relativistic Quantum Theory.- Monopole in Non-Abelian Gauge Theories.- ’t Hooft-Polyakov Monopole.- Multimonopole Configurations.- SU(2) Monopole in Quantum Theory.- Monopoles Beyond SU(2) Group.- Monopoles and the Problem of Confinement.- Fermions in the Field of Non-Abelian Monopole and Rubakov—Callan Effect.- Supersymmetric Monopoles.- Construction of Supersymmetric Yang-Mills Theories.- Magnetic Monopoles in the N = 2 Supersymmetric Yang-Mills Theory.- Seiberg—Witten Solution of N = 2 SUSY Yang—Mills Theory.

Editorial Reviews

From the reviews of the first edition:

"The modern era of the monopolic theory started in 1974 when Hooft and, independently, Polyakov found monopole solutions in quantum field theory … . This … is the subject of the carefully designed book by Shnir. It is written mainly for researchers and advanced students in theoretical physics and is to my knowledge the first coherent presentation of the subject." (Gert Roepstorff, Zentralblatt MATH, Vol. 1084, 2006)

From the Publisher