MAGNETIC CHARGE AS A HIDDEN GAUGE-SYMMETRY

A theory containing both electric and magnetic charges is formulated u sing two vectors potentials, A(mu) and C-mu. This has the aesthetic ad vantage of treating electric and magnetic charges both as gauge symmet ries, but it has the experimental disadvantage of introducing a second massless gauge boson (the ''magnetic'' photon) which is not observed. This problem is dealt with by using the Higgs mechanism to give a mas s to one of the gauge bosons while the other remains massless. This ef fectively ''hides'' the magnetic charge, and the symmetry associated w ith it, when one is at an energy scale far enough removed from the sca le of the symmetry breaking.