Spiked Monopoles

Understand

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.