A detailed study of the stability of vortons

Abstract

We construct and simulate the dynamics of gauged vortons — circular loops of cosmic string supported by the angular momentum of trapped charge and current and provide additional details on the fully stable vorton that we have previously presented. We find that their existence and dynamical properties can be accurately predicted by an analysis based on infinite, straight superconducting strings if an additional constraint on their phase frequency is satisfied. We show a good quantitative agreement with the thin string approximation (TSA) and provide evidence that curvature corrections are inversely proportional to the vorton radius. This is verified with an energy minimisation algorithm that produces vorton solutions and subsequent axial and full three dimensional evolution codes. We find that we can predict the frequencies of each mode of oscillation, determine which modes are unstable and calculate the growth rate of the unstable modes to a high degree of accuracy.