A General Theory of Oscillon Dynamics

TL;DR

This paper introduces a comprehensive analytical approach to study oscillon dynamics in scalar fields, providing high-accuracy insights into their stability, lifetime, and behavior across different spatial dimensions.

Contribution

It develops a nonperturbative analytical method for analyzing oscillons, revealing their interpretation as attractor perturbations and explaining their stability differences in 2D and 3D.

Findings

Oscillons can be viewed as long-lived perturbations around an attractor.

The method accurately estimates oscillon lifetimes in three dimensions.

Oscillons appear perturbatively stable in two dimensions due to radiation behavior.

Abstract

We present a comprehensive, nonperturbative analytical method to investigate the dynamics of time-dependent oscillating scalar field configurations. The method is applied to oscillons in a double well Klein-Gordon model in two and three spatial dimensions, yielding high accuracy results in the characterization of all aspects of the complex oscillon dynamics. In particular, we show how oscillons can be interpreted as long-lived perturbations about an attractor in field configuration space. By investigating their radiation rate as they approach the attractor, we obtain an accurate estimate of their lifetimes in d=3 and explain why they seem to be perturbatively stable in d=2, where d is the number of spatial dimensions.