On the magnetic monopole mass

Understand

Magnetic monopoles have been a subject of interest since Dirac established the relation between the existence of a monopole and charge quantization.

• 't Hooft and Polyakov proved that they can arise from gauge theories as the result of a non trivial topology.
• In their scheme the mass of the monopole turns out to be large proportional to the vector meson mass arising from the spontaneous breaking of the symmetry at unification scales.
• To reduce from the GUT scale to the Standard Model scale we modify the potential in line with Coleman-Weinberg schemes and generate a second deeper minimum turning the original vacuum quantum mechanically unstable.