Spiked Monopoles

TL;DR

This paper introduces the spiked monopole, a novel type of monopole with unique Higgs field properties, and uses numerical simulations to analyze their stability and interactions, with implications for dark matter and black hole formation.

Contribution

The paper presents the first simulation of spiked monopoles, revealing their stability and repulsive interactions, and explores their potential astrophysical implications.

Findings

Spiked monopoles are stable during simulations.

They exhibit always repulsive interactions.

Small repulsion occurs only at low Higgs VEVs.

Abstract

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.