Gravitational field of vacuumless defects - art. no. 063510

It has been recently shown that topological defects can arise in symmetry b reaking models where the scalar field potential V(phi) has no minima and is a monotonically decreasing function of \phi\. Here we study the gravitatio nal fields produced by such vacuumless defects in the cases of both global and gauge symmetry breaking. We find that a global monopole has a strongly repulsive gravitational field, and its spacetime has an event horizon simil ar to that in de Sitter space. A gauge monopole spacetime is essentially th at of a magnetically charged black hole. The gravitational field of a globa l string is repulsive and that of a gauge string is attractive at small dis tances and repulsive at large distances. Both gauge and global string space times have singularities at a finite distance from the string core. [S0556- 2821(99)01806-8].