Spherical symmetry of generalized EYMH fields

The possible actions of symmetry groups on generalized Higgs fields coupled to an Einstein-Yang-Mills field are studied with differential geometrical techniques involving principal and associated bundles. A classification of conjugacy classes of these actions and the form of the corresponding invariant EinsteinYang-Mills-Higgs (EYMH) fields is obtained and then applied to the case of static spherically symmetric fields over four-dimensional space-time. We identify the representations of the gauge group for which spherically symmetric Higgs fields exist. Then the set of all field equations for the independent functions that describe these fields is analyzed and the corresponding ordinary system of differential equations is derived and shown to be consistent. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.