Fields in nonaffine bundles. IV. Harmonious non-Abelian currents in string defects

Abstract

This article continues the study of the category of harmonious field models that was recently introduced as a kinetically non-linear generalisation of the well known harmonic category of multiscalar fields over a supporting brane wordsheet in a target space with a curved Riemannian metric. Like the perfectly harmonious case of which a familiar example is provided by ordinary barotropic perfect fluids, another important subcategory is the simply harmonious case, for which it is shown that as well as ``wiggle'' modes of the underlying brane world sheet, and sound type longitudinal modes, there will also be transverse shake modes that propagate at the speed of light. Models of this type are shown to arise from a non-Abelian generalisation of the Witten mechanism for conducting string formation by ordinary scalar fields with a suitable quartic self coupling term in the action.