185 research outputs found
Spiked Monopoles
We introduce the spiked monopole, which is a 't Hooft-Polyakov monopole with
two charged scalar Higgs fields, of which one enjoys a quartic
self-interaction. The free Higgs field behaves as in a BPS monopole, reducing
the inter-monopole repulsion. The other Higgs has a spiked profile similar to a
non-BPS monopole. Using the methods from numerical relativity recently adapted
to the Yang-Mills-Higgs theory by Vachaspati, we simulate the interactions of
such monopoles. During the long lifetime of these simulations the individual
monopoles are stable. We find that they are always repulsive, with a small
repulsion only when the interaction Higgs VEV is proportionately small. We
briefly comment on implications for giant monopole dark matter models and on
supermassive black hole seeding by the spikes.Comment: 18 pages, 4 PDF figure
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