Fermion-monopole scattering in the Standard Model

Abstract

We study the scattering of fermions off ’t Hooft lines in the Standard Model. A long-standing paradox suggests that the outgoing fermions necessarily carry fractional quantum numbers. In a previous paper, we resolved this paradox in the context of a number of toy models where we showed that the outgoing radiation is created by operators that are attached to a co-dimension 1 topological surface. This shifts the quantum numbers of the outgoing states associated to non-anomalous symmetries to be integer valued as required, while the quantum numbers associated to anomalous symmetries are fractional. Here we apply these ideas to the Standard Model.