April 19, 10:15 in E204 (Tuesday Seminar)   

Miklos Langvik (Helsinki)


 

Dirac Quantization of Monopoles in Noncommutative Space-Time

String theory and a high-energy Gedanken experiment motivate the possibility that space-time should be noncommutative at very short distances. In this context the notion of a point is an ill-defined object and one might expect results related to the existence of single points in a commutative space-time, such as the quantization of monopoles due to Dirac, to change in the noncommutative setting. In this talk, the topological formulation of magnetic monopoles due to Wu and Yang is generalized to noncommutative space. The solution of the noncommutative Maxwell equations is calculated perturbatively and it is concluded that, at least perturbatively, the quantization condition of Dirac for point-like monopoles does not hold in a noncommutative space-time.