10-15-2013, 07:32 AM
(This post was last modified: 10-15-2013, 07:41 AM by JohnnyYesterday.)
This may be fundamentally unworkable because of the nature of cosmic strings*, but consider if it's possible to make vortons with a circumference much smaller than a proton, maybe even down to near the Planck length.
This may not be as hard to do as it sounds, because closed loops of cosmic string that aren't vortons keep on shrinking until they finally completely evaporate away. Suppose a vorton factory injects charged particles onto the closed loops of string to arrest their shrinkage, stabilizing them as vortons at the desired size.
If this is possible, a vorton with a circumference of about 9.4 Planck lengths would have a mass of 9.09674101 × 10^-13 kg. For comparison, the mass of an electron is 9.10938291 × 10^-31 kg. A proton is about 1,800 times more massive than an electron. Since the vorton would have a charge, it could be thought of as a super-heavy electron or proton.
*Closed loops must have a fundamental smallest size, or they couldn't evaporate away, only grow smaller and smaller forever.
This may not be as hard to do as it sounds, because closed loops of cosmic string that aren't vortons keep on shrinking until they finally completely evaporate away. Suppose a vorton factory injects charged particles onto the closed loops of string to arrest their shrinkage, stabilizing them as vortons at the desired size.
If this is possible, a vorton with a circumference of about 9.4 Planck lengths would have a mass of 9.09674101 × 10^-13 kg. For comparison, the mass of an electron is 9.10938291 × 10^-31 kg. A proton is about 1,800 times more massive than an electron. Since the vorton would have a charge, it could be thought of as a super-heavy electron or proton.
*Closed loops must have a fundamental smallest size, or they couldn't evaporate away, only grow smaller and smaller forever.