Callan-Rubakov effect and higher charge monopoles

Abstract

Abstract In this paper we study the interaction between magnetic monopoles and massless fermions. In the low energy limit, the monopole’s magnetic field polarizes the fermions into purely in-going and out-going modes. Consistency requires that the UV fermion-monopole interaction leads to non-trivial IR boundary conditions that relate the in-going to out-going modes. These non-trivial boundary conditions lead to what is known as the Callan-Rubakov effect. Here we derive the effective boundary condition by explicitly integrating out the UV degrees of freedom for the general class of spherically symmetric SU(N) monopoles coupled to massless fermions of arbitrary representation. We then show that the boundary conditions preserve symmetries without ABJ-type anomalies. As an application we explicitly derive the boundary conditions for the stable, spherically symmetric monopoles associated to the SU(5) Georgi-Glashow model and comment on the relation to baryon number violation.