The Ubiquity of Gauged Q-Shells

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that in generic sixth-order polynomial potentials, gauged Q-shells are as ubiquitous as Q-balls, providing analytic characterizations and suggesting their widespread occurrence across various theories.

Contribution

It shows that Q-shells exist in a broad class of potentials, extending previous results limited to special cases, and offers simple analytic descriptions of these solutions.

Findings

Q-shells occur in generic sixth-order polynomial potentials.

Analytic formulas accurately predict Q-shell properties.

Q-shells are likely common in theories previously thought to only contain Q-balls.

Abstract

Non-topological gauged soliton solutions called Q-balls arise in many scalar field theories that are invariant under a U(1) gauge symmetry. The related, but qualitatively distinct, Q-shell solitons have only been shown to exist for special potentials. We investigate gauged solitons in a generic sixth-order polynomial potential (that contains the leading effects of many effective field theories) and show that this potential generically allows for both Q-balls and Q-shells. We argue that Q-shell solutions occur in many, and perhaps all, potentials that have previously only been shown to contain Q-balls. We give simple analytic characterizations of these Q-shell solutions, leading to excellent predictions of their physical properties.