Vortons, What Are They Good For?

[JohnnyYesterday]

I've been thinking about vortons--closed loops of cosmic string that are stable because of the angular momentum of trapped particles on them--and I wonder if they might be useful for something.

I did some very rough mass calculation of them. I assumed a vorton with a circumference of about 9.4 femtometers, and that a kilometer of cosmic string has a mass exactly that of Earth. I got 56,284,774.2 kg. Wow. Black holes of the same mass are only a couple of orders of magnitude smaller, but of course they are unstable due to Hawking radiation.

Like black holes, vortons can have a charge, so they can be manipulated.

[Drashner1]

Hmm. I had to google vortons to find out what they are.

As to what you could do with them...The first thought that comes to mind is something like the neubles from the book The Collapsium by Wil McCarthy.

Although I have doubts about the stability of such a thing (an object made out of arranged vortons, not the vorton itself), particularly when it would be given to pulling matter into itself, even if not as voraciously as a black hole. Although perhaps the charge might resist that...

If you could produce enough of them you basically have another form of exotic matter, denser than magmatter, but not BH dense.

Beyond that, I'm not sure. Others may have ideas or maybe something will bubble to the surface if I let the idea percolate in the back of my brain for a bit.

Todd

[Worldtree]

Here's some kinky vortons from cornell.
http://arxiv.org/abs/0806.2212


..yes. it's a scientific paper.

[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.

[Tachyon]

Here's some kinky vortons from cornell.
http://arxiv.org/abs/0806.2212


..yes. it's a scientific paper.

Unfortunately, 2+1 space doesn't help much with describing our 3+1 (at least) manifolds.