We have decided to discontinue the publication of preprints on our preprint server end of 2024. The publication culture within mathematics has changed so much due to the rise of repositories such as ArXiV (www.arxiv.org) that we are encouraging all institute members to make their preprints available there. An institute's repository in its previous form is, therefore, unnecessary. The preprints published to date will remain available here, but we will not add any new preprints here.
MiS Preprint
82/2004
The Topology of the Electroweak Interaction
Jürgen Tolksdorf
Abstract
In this paper we show that the Higgs boson of the (minimal) Standard Model has at most three gauge inequivalent ground states. One of these states is related to ordinary electromagnetism and the other two to electromagnetism within magnetically charged vacua. If space-time is assumed to be rotationally symmetric then the charged electroweak vacua may be identified with Dirac monopoles of magnetic charge ${\rm g}=\pm1/2$. This offers a physical interpretation of magnetic monopoles and Dirac's quantization condition of electric charge in terms of the electroweak interaction. Moreover, in the case of the (minimal) Standard Model the three possible gauge inequivalent ground states of the Higgs boson are shown to fully determine the topological structure of the gauge bundle which underlies the electroweak interaction.
