Magnetic monopoles in pure $SU(2)$ Yang--Mills theory with a gauge-invariant mass

Abstract

In this paper, we show the existence of magnetic monopoles in the pure $SU(2)$ Yang--Mills theory even in absence of scalar fields when the gauge-invariant mass term is introduced. This result follows from the recent proposal for obtaining the gauge field configurations in the Yang-Mills theory from the solutions of the field equations in the "complementary" gauge-scalar model with the radial length of the scalar field being fixed. The gauge-invariant mass term is obtained through a change of variables and a gauge-independent description of the Brout-Englert-Higgs mechanism which neither relies on the spontaneous breaking of gauge symmetry nor on the assumptions of the nonvanishing vacuum expectation value of the scalar field. According to these procedures, we solve under the static and spherically symmetric ansatz the field equations of the $SU(2)$ Yang-Mills theory coupled with an adjoint scalar field whose radial degree of freedom is fixed, and obtain a gauge field configuration of magnetic monopole with a minimum magnetic charge in the massive $SU(2)$ Yang-Mills theory. We compare the magnetic monopole obtained in this way in the massive Yang--Mills theory with the Wu-Yang magnetic monopole in the pure Yang-Mills theory and the 't Hooft-Polyakov magnetic monopole in the Georgi-Glashow model.

16 pages, 7 figures, revised version