Self-gravitating line sources of weak hypercharge

Abstract

We explore the role of the Cremmer-Scherk mechanism in the context of low energy effective string theory by coupling the antisymmetric 3-form gauge potential to an Abelian gauge potential carrying weak hypercharge. The theory admits a class of exact self-gravitating solutions in the spontaneously broken phase in which the dual fields acquire massive perturbative modes. Despite the massive nature of these fields they admit non-perturbative progressive longitudinal modes that together with pp-type gravitational waves travel in a direction of a line source at the speed of light.