Fundamental monopoles and multimonopole solutions for arbitrary simple gauge groups

Magnetic monopole solutions for an arbitrary compact simple gauge group are considered in the Prasad-Sommerfield limit. For each group and choice of symmetry breaking there is a set of fundamental monopoles with minimal topological charges and possessing no internal degrees of freedom; the number of these is less than or equal to the rank of the gauge group. It is shown that if the unbroken gauge group is abelian, all solutions with higher topological charges belong to p-parameter families, where p is the number of position and group orientation parameters needed to describe a set of non-interacting fundamental monopoles with the given topological charge. It is argued that these solutions, some examples of which are given, should therefore be interpreted as multimonopole configurations. An extension of these results to the case of a non-albelian unbroken gauge symmetry is conjecture and shown to be valid for a number of examples.