NONTOPOLOGICAL MAGNETIC MONOPOLES AND NEW MAGNETICALLY CHARGED BLACK-HOLES

The existence of nonsingular classical magnetic monopole solutions is usually understood in terms of topologically nontrivial Higgs field co nfigurations. We show that finite energy magnetic monopole solutions a lso exist within a class of purely Abelian gauge theories containing c harged vector mesons, even though the possibility of nontrivial topolo gy does not even arise provided that certain relationships among the p arameters of the theory are satisfied. These solutions are singular if these relationships do not hold, but even then become meaningful once the theory is coupled to gravity, for they then give rise to an inter esting new class of magnetically charged black holes with hair.