On energy extraction from Q-balls and other fundamental solitons

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that waves scattering off fundamental solitons like Q-balls can experience energy amplification through a blueshift-like mechanism, without requiring rotation or motion, with potential implications across physics fields.

Contribution

It introduces a novel energy enhancement mechanism for waves interacting with time-periodic solitons, distinct from superradiance, supported by analysis of two-dimensional Q-balls.

Findings

Energy amplification is possible without rotation or translation.

The mechanism is a blueshift-like energy exchange, not superradiance.

The process does not appear to cause instabilities.

Abstract

Energy exchange mechanisms have important applications in particle physics, gravity, fluid mechanics, and practically every field in physics. In this letter we show, both in frequency and time domain, that energy enhancement is possible for waves scattering off fundamental solitons (time-periodic localized structures of bosonic fields), without the need for rotation nor translational motion. We use two-dimensional Q-balls as a testbed, providing the correct criteria for energy amplification, as well as the respective amplification factors, and we discuss possible instability mechanisms. Our results lend support to the qualitative picture drawn in ( arXiv:2212.03269 [gr-qc] ); however we show that this enhancement mechanism is not of superradiant-type, but instead a "blueshift-like" energy exchange between scattering states induced by the background Q-ball, which should occur generically for any time-periodic fundamental soliton. This mechanism does not seem to lead to instabilities.