International Association for
Relativistic Dynamics

Abstract

The pure \(R^2\) gravity is equivalent to Einstein gravity with cosmological constant and a massless scalar field and it further possesses the so-called restricted Weyl symmetry which is a symmetry larger than scale symmetry. To incorporate matter, we consider a restricted Weyl invariant action composed of pure \(R^2\) gravity, SU(2) Yang-Mills fields and a non-minimally coupled massless Higgs field (a triplet of scalars). When the restricted Weyl symmetry is spontaneously broken, it is equivalent to an Einstein-Yang-Mills-Higgs (EYMH) action with a cosmological constant and a massive Higgs non-minimally coupled to gravity i.e. via a term \(\xi R|\Phi|^2\) . When the restricted Weyl symmetry is not spontaneously broken, linearization about Minkowski space-time does not yield gravitons in the original \(R^2\) gravity and hence it does not gravitate. However, we show that in the broken gauge sector of our theory, where the Higgs field acquires a non-zero vacuum expectation value, Minkowski space-time is a viable gravitating background solution. We then obtain numerically gravitating magnetic monopole solutions for non-zero coupling constant \(\xi=1/6\) in three different backgrounds: Minkowski, anti-de Sitter (AdS) and de Sitter (dS), all of which are realized in our restricted Weyl invariant theory.