Dyons in higher-dimensional gauge theories

Abstract: We discuss the 't Hooft-Polyakov (TP) monopole and then dyon in the framework of the higher dimensional gauge theories, such as the gauge-Higgs unification models. First, we point out that the Bogomol'nyi-Prasad-Sommerfield (BPS) monopole is nothing but a self-dual gauge field in the 4-dimensional (4D) space including the extra dimension. This property is argued to have an inevitable remarkable consequence that the mass of the BPS monopole $M_{{\rm TPM}}$ and therefore the vacuum expectation value (VEV) of the Higgs field are topologically quantized. Next, the argument is generalized to the case of dyon.The mass of the BPS dyon, $M_{{\rm BPS}}$, is still proportional to the quantized Higgs VEV, though it also depends on a parameter $\mu$, denoting the ratio of the electric and magnetic charges of the dyon. In this paper, we propose a novel mechanism to quantize the parameter $\mu$ too. We demonstrate that in the 5D gauge theories the Chern-Simons term is induced at the quantum level, which, after the extra space component of the gauge field is replaced by its VEV, produces the $\theta$ term. Here again the VEV is quantized and through the Witten effect we reach to a remarkable conclusion that the electric charge of the dyon, and therefore the parameter $\mu$ is discretized. This means that $M_{{\rm BPS}}$ is also discretized. In addition, we propose a numerical method to obtain the field configurations and the mass of the non-BPS dyons by use of ``modified" gradient flow equations. We find that the obtained field configurations of non-BPS dyon and its mass are rather close to those of the BPS dyon.