Are gravitating magnetic monopoles stable?

Abstract

The gravitating Julia-Zee dyon is a particle-like solution with both electric and magnetic charge. It is found in the Einstein-Yang-Mills-Higgs system of SU(2) with a scalar field in the adjoint representation coupled to gravity. Within the magnetic ansatz this system is reduced from describing dyons to describing the gravitating 't Hooft-Polyakov magnetic monopole. The stability of the well-known static gravitating magnetic monopole solutions with respect to perturbations within the magnetic ansatz--so-called magnetic perturbations--is well studied, but their stability with respect to perturbations outside the magnetic ansatz--so-called sphaleronic perturbations--is not. I undertake a purely numerical study by adding sphaleronic perturbations to gravitating magnetic monopole solutions and then dynamically evolving the system. For large perturbations I find that the system heads toward a dyon configuration, as expected. For sufficiently small perturbations, however, the system oscillates about the magnetic ansatz in a manner consistent with oscillations about a stable equilibrium.