Gravity thaws the frozen moduli of the C P^1 lump

James Martin Speight and I.A.B. Strachan

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Submission date: 05. May. 1999
Pages: 9
published in: Physics Letters / B, 457 (1999) 1-3, p. 17-22 
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Abstract:
The slow motion of a self-gravitating C P¹ lump is investigated in the approximation of geodesic flow on the moduli space of unit degree static solutions M₁. It is found that moduli which are frozen in the absence of gravity, parametrizing the lump's width and internal orientation, may vary once gravitational effects are included. If gravitational coupling is sufficiently strong, the presence of the lump shrinks physical space to finite volume, and the moduli determining the boundary value of the C P¹ field thaw also. Explicit formulae for the metric on M₁ are found in both the weak and strong coupling regimes. The geodesic problem for weak coupling is studied in detail, and it is shown that M₁ is geodesically incomplete. This leads to the prediction that self-gravitating lumps are unstable.