Giant monopoles as a dark matter candidate

Abstract

The most prominent successes of weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP) models of dark matter are at comoving scales of megaparsecs. At kiloparsec scales they face challenges in explaining the density profiles, abundances and phase space distributions of satellite galaxies in our local group. An alternate dark matter candidate, the giant 't Hooft-Polyakov monopole, is proposed which may share the large distance successes of WIMPs while evading their short distance problems. These are classical field theory solutions of a dark sector including a nonabelian gauge field, an adjoint scalar field and fundamental fermions. In such models each halo consists of a single monopole characterized by a conserved integer charge.