Antisymmetric tensors and spontaneous symmetry breaking

Abstract

The action for an antisymmetric tensor interacting with a massive Higgs field is derived via a Legendre transformation on the abelian Higgs model. It is shown that vortices in the abelian Higgs model have equivalent representations in terms of the antisymmetric tensor, and in the limit of very thin vortices we obtain the Kalb-Ramond action for fundamental strings. The system described here has applications to superfluid helium and axion cosmology.