Spiked Monopoles

Abstract: We introduce the spiked monopole, which is a 't Hooft-Polyakov monopole with two charged scalar Higgs fields, of which one enjoys a quartic self-interaction. The free Higgs field behaves as in a BPS monopole, reducing the inter-monopole repulsion. The other Higgs has a spiked profile similar to a non-BPS monopole. Using the methods from numerical relativity recently adapted to the Yang-Mills-Higgs theory by Vachaspati, we simulate the interactions of such monopoles. During the long lifetime of these simulations the individual monopoles are stable. We find that they are always repulsive, with a small repulsion only when the interaction Higgs VEV is proportionately small. We briefly comment on implications for giant monopole dark matter models and on supermassive black hole seeding by the spikes.