Self-dual instantons and gravitating dyons in non-Abelian ModMax theory

Abstract: Motivated by the recent interest in conformal and duality invariant nonlinear electrodynamics, we study the non-Abelian extension of ModMax electrodynamics. The theory is parameterized by a single dimensionless constant, and it is continuously connected to Yang-Mills theory in its vanishing limit. We show that the theory admits (anti-)self-dual instantons, despite the additional nonlinearities that characterize the non-Abelian ModMax theory. For $SU(2)$, we construct the generalization of the BPST instanton and extend this solution to Euclidean de Sitter and anti-de Sitter backgrounds. In the latter case, the Chern-Pontryagin index depends on the instanton size since the configuration is not a pure gauge at infinity; a property already pointed out in Yang-Mills on negative-curvature backgrounds by Callan and Wilczek. We compute the contribution of the latter to the spectrum of the Dirac operator at the boundary, which is crucial for determining the non-local contributions to the Dirac index. Then, we show that the ansatz constructed with 't Hooft symbols accommodates multi-instantons in the non-Abelian ModMax theory. The system of (anti-)self-dual equations reduces to a single nonlinear equation, which can be perturbatively solved order by order in the parameter that controls the nonlinearity. Following such a strategy, we provide a formal solution for the $N$-instanton configuration to first order in the expansion. Then, we couple non-Abelian ModMax theory to gravity with a conformally coupled scalar field and construct new gravitating solutions that describe Euclidean wormholes and other smooth configurations with secondary hair.