Magnetic field in vacuum of quantum spinor matter induced by a cosmic string in three-dimensional space

Abstract

A linear magnetic topological defect (cosmic string) is modeled as a magnetic flux-carrying tube that is impenetrable to external spinor matter. The matter field is quantized in the background of this tube, with the most general set of boundary conditions ensuring both the tube's impenetrability and the self-adjointness of the Dirac Hamiltonian operator. We compute the induced vacuum magnetic flux along the tube in (3+1)-dimensional space-time. It was shown that the requirement for the total induced vacuum magnetic flux to be finite restricts the admissible boundary conditions to only one choice: the MIT quark bag boundary condition. The dependence of the effect on the transverse size of the tube and the flux inside the tube was also analyzed.