Scattering of wobbling vortices

Abstract

We investigate the dynamical role of internal vibrational modes in the Abelian Higgs model, focusing on how Derrick-type excitations modify vortex dynamics and scattering processes. We study the scattering of excited vortices and show that the interplay between spectral flow and mode excitation generates effective forces and enables resonant energy transfer between translational and internal degrees of freedom. As a result, vortex dynamics become strongly non-adiabatic, exhibiting super-elastic collisions, oscillatory dependence of the final state on initial conditions, and the emergence of fractal structures in scattering diagrams. Our results demonstrate that internal vibrational modes play a fundamental role in vortex interactions, going beyond the standard moduli space approximation and revealing a rich phenomenology driven by mode dynamics.