A soliton menagerie in AdS

TL;DR

This paper investigates charged scalar solitons in AdS4, revealing their ability to become large, connect with black hole solutions, and exhibit complex phase behavior influenced by boundary conditions and parameters.

Contribution

It demonstrates that charged scalar solitons in AdS4 can become large, connect with black holes, and display multiple solution branches, including non-perturbative ones, with implications for supergravity models.

Findings

Solitons can become large relative to the AdS scale.

Multiple solution branches, including non-perturbative ones, are found.

Critical behavior depends on scalar charge and boundary conditions.

Abstract

We explore the behaviour of charged scalar solitons in asymptotically global AdS4 spacetimes. This is motivated in part by attempting to identify under what circumstances such objects can become large relative to the AdS length scale. We demonstrate that such solitons generically do get large and in fact in the planar limit smoothly connect up with the zero temperature limit of planar scalar hair black holes. In particular, for given Lagrangian parameters we encounter multiple branches of solitons: some which are perturbatively connected to the AdS vacuum and surprisingly, some which are not. We explore the phase space of solutions by tuning the charge of the scalar field and changing scalar boundary conditions at AdS asymptopia, finding intriguing critical behaviour as a function of these parameters. We demonstrate these features not only for phenomenologically motivated gravitational Abelian-Higgs models, but also for models that can be consistently embedded into eleven dimensional supergravity.