One reason why cosmic strings are interesting is because they may provide the primordial density fluctuations that began the process of galaxy formation. For the scenario in which galaxies condense around oscillating closed loops it is necessary that gravitational radiation be the dominant energy loss mechanism. It is shown that loops of strings from a broken exact global symmetry decay too qui...

We study the phase diagram of dense quark matter with an emphasis on the role of the strange quark mass. Our approach is based on two effective field theories (EFTs). The first is an EFT that describes quark quasi-particles near the Fermi surface. This EFT is valid at energies small compared to the chemical potential. The second is an EFT for the Goldstone modes in the paired phase. We find tha...

To analyze the physical consequences of a dynamically broken theory of the weak interactions, we must know how the weak gauge group is aligned in an approximate flavor-symmetry group. For a large class of models, spectral-function sum rules enable us to determine this alignment explicitly. We work out the pattern of the electroweak symmetry breakdown for several sample models. Critical values o...

We consider a model with global Abelian chiral symmetry of two massless fermion fields interacting with a complex massive scalar field. We argue that the Schwinger–Dyson equations for the fermion and boson propagators admit ultraviolet-finite chiral-symmetry-breaking solutions provided the Yukawa couplings are large enough. The fermions acquire masses and the elementary excitations of the compl...

Beyond the scale of spontaneous breaking of chiral symmetry light and strange baryons should be considered as systems of three constituent quarks with confining interaction and a chiral interaction that is mediated by Goldstone bosons between the constituent quarks. The flavor-spin structure and sign of the short-range part of the Goldstone boson exchange interaction reduces the SU(6)FS symmetr...