Stabilizing textures in 3+1 dimensions with semilocality - art. no. 047301

It is shown that textures in 3+1 dimensions can be stabilized by partial ga uging (semilocality) of the vacuum manifold such that topological unwinding by a gauge transformation is not possible. This introduction of gauge fiel ds can be used to evade Derrick's theorem without higher powers of derivati ves and prevent the usual collapse of textures by the effective "pressure" terms induced by the gauge fields. A virial theorem is derived and shown to be a manifestation of the stability of the configuration towards collapse.