Effective 't Hooft-Polyakov monopoles from pure SU(3) gauge theory

Abstract

The well known topological monopoles originally investigated by 't Hooft and Polyakov are known to arise in classical Yang-Mills-Higgs theory. With a pure gauge theory it is known that the classical Yang-Mills field equation do not have such finite energy configurations. Here we argue that such configurations may arise in a semi-quantized Yang-Mills theory, where the original gauge group, SU(3), is reduced to a smaller gauge group, SU(2), and with some combination of the coset fields of the SU(3) to SU(2) reduction acting as effective scalar fields. The procedure is called semi-quantized since some of the original gauge fields are treated as quantum degrees of freedom, while others are postulated to be effectively described as classical degrees of freedom. Some speculation is offer on a possible connection between these monopole configurations and the confinement problem, and the nucleon spin puzzle.