Confined magnetic monopoles in dense QCD

Abstract

Non-Abelian strings exist in the color-flavor locked phase of dense QCD. We show that kinks appearing in the world-sheet theory on these strings, in the form of the kink-antikink bound pairs, are the magnetic monopoles—descendants of the ’t Hooft–Polyakov monopoles surviving in such a special form in dense QCD. Our consideration is heavily based on analogies and inspiration coming from certain supersymmetric non-Abelian theories. This is the first ever analytic demonstration that objects unambiguously identifiable as the magnetic monopoles are native to non-Abelian Yang–Mills theories (albeit our analysis extends only to the phase of the monopole confinement and has nothing to say about their condensation). Technically, our demonstration becomes possible due to the fact that low-energy dynamics of the non-Abelian strings in dense QCD is that of the orientational zero modes. It is described by an effective two-dimensional CP(2) model on the string world sheet. The kinks in this model representing confined magnetic monopoles are in a highly quantum regime.