Monopoles in even dimensions (Q2393177)

Though there has been so far no direct experimental verification of Dirac magnetic monopoles, their existence would have far-reaching consequences such as the quantization of electric charge. Later on there have been many further attempts to generalize the monopole concept to non-abelian gauge theories. There is the 't Hooft-Polyakov monopole, the Wu-Yang monopole, and the Seiberg-Witten monopole to mention just a few examples. In mathematical terms, a monopole is simply a connection over a principal bundle with a section of the associated adjoint bundle. In physics the concept of monopoles is part of non-perturbative solutions called solitons. In this article monopole solutions are studied in the framework of pure Yang-Mills theories using symmetric spaces of even dimension. Using this geometrical language, gauge potentials and their related field strengths are connections on principal bundles and their curvature. The structure of the paper is as follows. Section 1 provides a survey over the physical motivation and the mathematical tools needed to work with monopoles though there exist already many reviews in the literature. In Section 2, the authors recall the main geometric concepts, i.e. principal bundles used in gauge theories. Next, in Section 3, they introduce homogeneous principal bundles over homogeneous spaces admitting the left action of a Lie group. In Section 4 an explicit procedure is presented to construct the field strength in terms of the Lie algebra connected with the Lie group involved. Some examples are treated in detail. In Section 5, the Chern-Weil homomorphism and the de Rham cohomology are recalled. It is shown how one gets the charge of a monopole. Finally, in Section 6, the tools so far developed are applied to well-known examples such as the Dirac monopole with gauge group \(U(1)\), the Yang monopole with gauge group \(SU(2)\), and monopoles with gauge group \(SO(2n)\) or \(SO(2n+1)\). The list of references is large (41). Though there exists a much wider choice of articles.