Stability of topological solitons, and black string to bubble transition

TL;DR

This paper investigates the stability and phase transitions of topological solitons and black strings in five-dimensional Einstein-Maxwell gravity, revealing new stable solutions and a Hawking-Page transition mechanism.

Contribution

It demonstrates the existence of stable topological solitons beyond supersymmetry and analyzes their phase structure and transitions with black strings.

Findings

Objects are locally stable in large phase space regions.

Hawking-Page transitions occur between solitons and black strings.

Identifies globally stable phases for various boundary conditions.

Abstract

We study the existence of smooth topological solitons and black strings as locally-stable saddles of the Euclidean gravitational action of five dimensional Einstein-Maxwell theory. These objects live in the Kaluza-Klein background of four dimensional Minkowski with an $S^1$. We compute the off-shell gravitational action in the canonical ensemble with fixed boundary data corresponding to the asymptotic radius of $S^1$, and to the electric and magnetic charges that label the solitons and black strings. We show that these objects are locally-stable in large sectors of the phase space with varying lifetime. Furthermore, we determine the globally-stable phases for different regimes of the boundary data, and show that there can be Hawking-Page transitions between the locally-stable phases of the topological solitons and black strings. This analysis demonstrates the existence of a large family of globally-stable smooth solitonic objects in gravity beyond supersymmetry, and presents a mechanism through which they can arise from the black strings.