Vacuum energies of non-abelian string-configurations in 3+1 dimensions

We develop a method to compute the fermion contribution to the vacuum polarization energy of stringlike configurations in a non-abelian gauge theory. This calculation has been hampered previously by a number of technical obstacles. We use gauge invariance of the energy and separation of length scales in the energy density to overcome these obstacles. We present a proof-of-principle investigation that shows that this energy is small in the (MS) over bar renormalization scheme. The generalization to other schemes is straightforward. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.