Thin-wall monopoles in a false vacuum

Abstract

We study numerically the existence in a false vacuum of magnetic monopoles that are “thin walled,” i.e., which correspond to a spherical region of radius R that is essentially trivial surrounded by a wall of thickness Δ≪R, hence the name thin wall, and finally an exterior region that essentially corresponds to a pure Abelian magnetic monopole. Such monopoles were dubbed false monopoles and can occur in non-Abelian gauge theories where the symmetry-broken vacuum is actually the false vacuum. This idea was first proposed in Kumar []; however, the proof of the existence of thin-wall, false monopoles given there was incorrect. Here, we fill this lacuna and demonstrate numerically, for an appropriately modified potential, the existence of thin-wall false monopoles. The decay via quantum tunneling of the false monopoles could be of importance to cosmological scenarios that entertain epochs in which the Universe is trapped in a symmetry-broken false vacuum. Published by the American Physical Society 2024