Electroweak Monopoles, Magnetic Fields, and Topological Defect Formation

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Synopsis

I will argue that the vacuum manifold of the standard model of particle physics is better viewed as a Hopf fibered three sphere and that the model contains both magnetic monopoles and strings. The Kibble mechanism is applied to electroweak symmetry breaking to obtain the monopole-string network and to obtain an estimate for the cosmological magnetic field. A rigorous analysis of the quantum formation of topological defects will also be discussed with results that can be compared to those using the Kibble-Zurek mechanism.