  The well known topological monopoles originally investigated by 't Hooft and
Polyakov are known to arise in classical Yang-Mills-Higgs theory. With a pure
gauge theory it is known that the classical Yang-Mills field equation do not
have such finite energy configurations. Here we argue that such configurations
may arise in a semi-quantized Yang-Mills theory, where the original gauge
group, SU(3), is reduced to a smaller gauge group, SU(2), and with some
combination of the coset fields of the SU(3) to SU(2) reduction acting as
effective scalar fields. The procedure is called semi-quantized since some of
the original gauge fields are treated as quantum degrees of freedom, while
others are postulated to be effectively described as classical degrees of
freedom. Some speculation is offer on a possible connection between these
monopole configurations and the confinement problem, and the nucleon spin
puzzle.
