Gravitationally coupled magnetic monopole and conformal symmetry breakingThis paper was presented at the Theory CANADA 4 conference, held at Centre de recherches mathématiques, Montréal, Québec, Canada on 4–7 June 2008.

Abstract

We consider a Georgi–Glashow model conformally coupled to gravity. The conformally invariant action includes a triplet of scalar fields and SO(3) non-Abelian gauge fields. However, the usual mass term μ2ϕ2 is forbidden by the symmetry, and this role is now played by the conformal coupling of the Ricci scalar to the scalar fields. Spontaneous symmetry breaking occurs via gravitation. The spherically symmetric solutions correspond to localized solitons (magnetic monopoles) in asymptotically anti-de Sitter (AdS) spacetime and the metric outside the core of the monopole is found to be Schwarzschild–AdS. Though conformal symmetry excludes the Einstein–Hilbert term in the original action, it emerges in the effective action after spontaneous symmetry breaking and dominates the low-energy–long-distance regime outside the core of the monopole.