The Emergence of Electroweak Skyrmions through Higgs Bosons

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates the theoretical existence of electroweak skyrmions within the Standard Model, explores their properties, stability, and potential as dark matter candidates, and proposes collider experiments to detect them.

Contribution

It identifies stabilizing operators for electroweak skyrmions, uses neural networks for property calculations, and links skyrmion detection to high-energy collider measurements.

Findings

Electroweak skyrmions are stable, long-lived solitons in the Standard Model.

They can serve as viable dark matter candidates.

Collider measurements of the Skyrme term could reveal skyrmion existence.

Abstract

Skyrmions are extended field configurations, initially proposed to describe baryons as topological solitons in an effective field theory of mesons. We investigate and confirm the existence of skyrmions within the electroweak sector of the Standard Model and study their properties. We find that the interplay of the electroweak sector with a dynamical Higgs field and the Skyrme term leads to a non-trivial vacuum structure with the skyrmion and perturbative vacuum sectors separated by a finite energy barrier. We identify dimension-8 operators that stabilise the electroweak skyrmion as a spatially localised soliton field configuration with finite size. Such operators are induced generically by a wide class of UV models. To calculate the skyrmion energy and radius we use a neural network method. Electroweak skyrmions are non-topological solitons but are exponentially long lived, and we find that the electroweak skyrmion is a viable dark matter candidate. While the skyrmion production cross section at collider experiments is suppressed, measuring the size of the Skyrme term in multi-Higgs-production processes at high-energy colliders is a promising avenue to probe the existence of electroweak skyrmions.