Analytic non-Abelian gravitating solitons in the Einstein-Yang-Mills-Higgs theory and transitions between them

Two analytic examples of globally regular non-Abelian gravitating solitons in the Einstein-Yang-Mills-Higgs theory in (3+1)-dimensions are presented. In both cases, the space-time geometries are of the Nariai type and the Yang-Mills field is completely regular and of meron type (namely, proportional to a pure gauge). However, while in the first family (type I) $X_{0} = 1/2$ (as in all the known examples of merons available so far) and the Higgs field is trivial, in the second family (type II) $X_{0}$ is not 1/2 and the Higgs field is non-trivial. We compare the entropies of type I and type II families determining when type II solitons are favored over type I solitons: the VEV of the Higgs field plays a crucial role in determining the phases of the system. The Klein-Gordon equation for test scalar fields coupled to the non-Abelian fields of the gravitating solitons can be written as the sum of a two-dimensional D'Alembert operator plus a Hamiltonian which has been proposed in the literature to describe the four-dimensional Quantum Hall Effect (QHE): the difference between type I and type II solutions manifest itself in a difference between the degeneracies of the corresponding energy levels.