Magnetic charge and massive photons

This thesis investigates the theoretical behavior of magnetic monopoles in a variety of scenarios. The scenarios covered will be the Dirac string model, Wu-Yang topological model, and the Cabibbo-Ferrari two-potential approach. For the Cabibbo-Ferrari approach, we will apply spontaneous symmetry breaking to make one of the photons (associated with one of the vector potentials) massive. This symmetry breaking is done with two complex scalar fields and we find some additional conditions on the charges along with the usual Dirac condition between electric and magnetic charge. In the Dirac string approach we show that adding a photon mass term leads to the string singularity becoming a real singularity in the magnetic field. The physical implications from these calculations is the possibility that magnetic monopoles have a confinement property similar to the hypothesized quark confinement property.