Q-balls in Non-Minimally Coupled Palatini Inflation and their Implications for Cosmology

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates the existence of Q-balls in non-minimally coupled Palatini inflation models, explores their properties, and discusses their potential impact on early universe cosmology, including black hole formation and gravitational wave signatures.

Contribution

It is the first to identify and analyze Q-balls within non-minimally coupled Palatini inflation, revealing their role in post-inflationary dynamics and cosmological implications.

Findings

Q-balls exist with field values around 10^{17}-10^{18} GeV.

Q-balls can lead to primordial black hole formation with masses around 500 kg.

Q-balls may cause an early matter domination period affecting reheating.

Abstract

We demonstrate the existence of Q-balls in non-minimally coupled inflation models with a complex inflaton in the Palatini formulation of gravity. We show that there exist Q-ball solutions which are compatible with inflation and we derive a window in the inflaton mass squared for which this is the case. In particular, we confirm the existence of Q-ball solutions with $\phi \sim 10^{17}-10^{18}$ GeV, consistent with the range of field values following the end of slow-roll Palatini inflation. We study the Q-balls and their properties both numerically and in an analytical approximation. The existence of such Q-balls suggests that the complex inflaton condensate can fragment into Q-balls, and that there may be an analogous process for the case of a real inflaton with fragmentation to neutral oscillons. We discuss the possible post-inflationary cosmology following the formation of Q-balls, including an early Q-ball matter domination (eMD) period and the effects of this on the reheating dynamics of the model, gravitational wave signatures which may be detectable in future experiments, and the possibility that Q-balls could lead to the formation of primordial black holes (PBHs). In particular, we show that Palatini Q-balls with field strengths typical of inflaton condensate fragmentation can directly form black holes with masses around 500 kg or more when the self-coupling is $\lambda = 0.1$, resulting in very low (less than 100 GeV) reheating temperatures from black hole decay, with smaller black hole masses and larger reheating temperatures possible for smaller values of $\lambda$. Q-ball dark matter from non-minimally coupled Palatini inflation may also be a direction for future work.