Dyons in higher-dimensional gauge theories

TL;DR

This paper explores monopoles and dyons in higher-dimensional gauge theories, revealing topological quantization of their masses and proposing a numerical method for non-BPS configurations.

Contribution

It demonstrates the topological quantization of monopole and dyon masses in higher-dimensional gauge theories and introduces a numerical approach for non-BPS dyon configurations.

Findings

Monopole mass is topologically quantized in higher dimensions.

Dyon mass depends on quantized Higgs VEV and charge ratio parameter.

Discretization of the dyon parameter μ via the Witten effect.

Abstract

We discuss the 't Hooft-Polyakov (TP) monopole and then dyon in the framework of higher dimensional gauge theories, such as gauge-Higgs unification models. First, we point out that the Bogomol'nyi-Prasad-Sommerfield (BPS) monopole is nothing but a self-dual gauge field in the 4-dimensional (4D) space including the extra dimension, which is argued to lead to a consequence that the mass of the BPS monopole $M_{{\rm TPM}}$ and therefore the vacuum expectation value (VEV) of the Higgs field are topologically quantized. In literatures, there exist related arguments on the calorons, which may be understood to be a composition of a pair of constituent monopole and anti-monopole, with each constituent carrying fractional topological charge, while the net topological charge carried by the caloron is unity. From the viewpoint of the caloron, our conclusion of the quantized monopole mass corresponds to the special case, where only a single monopole exists that carries the net topological charge. Next, the argument is generalized to the case of dyon. The mass of the BPS dyon, $M_{{\rm BPS}}$, is still proportional to the quantized Higgs VEV, though it also depends on a parameter $\mu$, denoting the ratio of the electric and magnetic charges of the dyon. In the 5D gauge theories the Chern-Simons term is induced at the quantum level, which, after the extra space component of the gauge field is replaced by its VEV, produces the $\theta$ term. Then, through the Witten effect we reach to an interesting conclusion that the parameter $\mu$ and therefore $M_{{\rm BPS}}$ are discretized. In addition, we propose a numerical method to obtain the field configurations and the mass of the non-BPS dyons by use of ``modified" gradient flow equations.