Charge-Swapping Q-balls in a Logarithmic Potential and Affleck-Dine condensate fragmentation

TL;DR

This paper investigates charge-swapping Q-balls with a logarithmic potential, demonstrating their copious formation during early universe processes and their extreme stability through extensive lattice simulations.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of charge-swapping Q-balls in a logarithmic potential and shows their formation and stability in the context of the Affleck-Dine mechanism.

Findings

Charge-swapping Q-balls are copiously generated during Affleck-Dine fragmentation.

These Q-balls exhibit extremely long lifetimes, exceeding 10^5 in 3+1D and 10^7 in 2+1D.

The study maps the initial conditions leading to charge-swapping Q-balls.

Abstract

We study charge-swapping Q-balls, a kind of composite Q-ball where positive and negative charges co-exist and swap with time, in models with a logarithmic potential that arises naturally in supersymmetric extensions of the Standard Model. We show that charge-swapping Q-balls can be copiously generated in the Affleck-Dine fragmentation process in the early universe. We find that the charge-swapping Q-balls with the logarithmic potential are extremely stable. By performing long time, parallelized lattice simulations with absorbing boundary conditions, we find that the lifetimes of such objects with low multipoles are at least $4.6 \times 10^5/m$ in 3+1D and $2.5 \times 10^7/m$ in 2+1D, where $m$ is the mass scale of the scalar field. We also chart the attractor basin of the initial conditions to form these charge-swapping Q-balls.