Electroweak monopoles and their stability

Abstract

We apply a generalized field ansatz to describe the spherically symmetric sector of classical solutions in the electroweak theory. This sector contains Abelian magnetic monopoles labeled by their magnetic charge n=±1,±2,…, the non-Abelian monopole for n=±2 found previously by Cho and Maison (CM), and also the electric oscillating solutions. All magnetic monopoles have infinite energy. We analyze their perturbative stability and use the method of complex spacetime tetrad to separate variables and reduce the perturbation equations to multi-channel Schroedinger-type eigenvalue problems. The spectra of perturbations around the CM monopole do not contain negative modes, hence this solution is stable. The n=±1 Abelian monopole is also stable, but all monopoles with |n|≥2 are unstable with respect to perturbations with angular momentum j=|n|/2−1. The Abelian |n|=2 monopole is unstable only within the j=0 sector whereas the CM monopole also has |n|=2 and belongs to the same sector, hence it may be viewed as a stable remnant of the decay of the Abelian monopole. One may similarly conjecture that stable remnants exist also for monopoles with |n|>2, hence the CM monopole is just the first member of a sequence of non-Abelian monopoles with higher magnetic charges. Only the CM monopole is spherically symmetric while all non-Abelian monopoles with |n|>2 are not rotationally invariant.