SUPERSYMMETRIC SELF-GRAVITATING SOLITONS

We show that the ''instantonic'' soliton of five-dimensional Yang-Mills theory and the closely related BPS monopole of four-dimensional Yang-Mills/Higgs theory continue to be exact static, and stable, solutions of these field theories even after the inclusion of gravitational, electromagnetic and, in the four-dimensional case, dilatonic interactions, provided that certain non-minimal interactions are included. With the inclusion of these interactions, which would be required by sypersymmetry, these exact self-gravitating solitons saturate a gravitational version of the Bogomol'nyi bound on the energy of an arbitrary field configuration.