The price of an electroweak monopole

In a recent paper, Cho, Kim and Yoon (CKY) have proposed a version of the SU(2)×U(1)SU(2)×U(1) Standard Model with finite-energy monopole and dyon solutions. The CKY model postulates that the effective U(1) gauge coupling →∞ very rapidly as the Englert–Brout–Higgs vacuum expectation value →0, but in a way that is incompatible with LHC measurements of the Higgs boson H→γγH→γγ decay rate. We construct generalisations of the CKY model that are compatible with the H→γγH→γγ constraint, and calculate the corresponding values of the monopole and dyon masses. We find that the monopole mass could be <5.5 TeV<5.5 TeV, so that it could be pair-produced at the LHC and accessible to the MoEDAL experiment.