Spontaneous breaking of the rotational symmetry induced by monopoles in extra dimensions

We propose a field theoretical model that exhibits spontaneous breaking of the rotational symmetry. The model has a two-dimensional sphere as extra dimensions of the space-time and consists of a complex scalar field and a background gauge field. The Dirac monopole, which is invariant under the rotations of the sphere, is taken as the background field. We show that when the radius of the sphere is larger than a certain critical radius, the vacuum expectation value of the scalar field develops vortices, which pin down the rotational symmetry to lower symmetries. We evaluate the critical radius and calculate configurations of the vortices by the lowest approximation. The original model has a U(I) x SU(2) symmetry and it is broken to U(I), U(I), D-3 for each case of the monopole number q = 1/2, 1, 3/2, respectively, where D3 is the symmetry group of a regular triangle. Moreover, we show that the vortex configurations are stable against higher corrections of the perturbative, approximation. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.