Charge screening in the Abelian Higgs model

In the Abelian Higgs model electric (and magnetic) fields of external charges (and currents) are screened by the scalar field. In this contribution, complementing recent investigations of Ishihara and Ogawa, we present a detailed investigation of charge screening using a perturbative approach with the charge strength as an expansion parameter. It is shown how perfect global and remarkably good local screening can be derived from Gauss’ theorem, and the asymptotic form of the fields far from the sources. The perturbative results are shown to compare favourably to the numerical ones.