Topolons: Stable Particle-Like Remnants of Collapsed Vacuum Bubbles

TL;DR

This paper introduces topolons, stable particle-like remnants from collapsed vacuum bubbles supported by flux, which could serve as dark relic candidates with potential cosmological significance.

Contribution

It presents a novel class of stable, flux-supported, particle-like states called topolons arising from vacuum bubble collapse in a four-form gauge theory.

Findings

Topolons are stable, finite-energy remnants with mass set by wall scale and flux.

Collapsed vacuum bubbles do not stabilize but relax into topolons instead.

Topolons behave as heavy localized states at macroscopic distances.

Abstract

We study a three-form gauge sector in four spacetime dimensions coupled to electrically charged spherical membranes whose worldvolume dynamics are governed by a Dirac--Born--Infeld action. The associated four-form field strength has no local propagating degrees of freedom and contributes a branch-dependent vacuum energy. Motivated by the Hartle--Hawking--Wu selection argument, we restrict attention to the semiclassically admissible four form flux window for which the Hartle-Hawking wave function has support. We then endow the bubble wall with a worldvolume $U(1)$ gauge field carrying quantized monopole flux $n \in \mathbb{Z}$ and evaluate the full DBI energy of the resulting spherical configurations. We show that the energetically preferred branch collapses toward a microscopic core rather than stabilizing at finite radius, but for nonzero monopole flux the energy does not vanish in the collapsed limit. Instead, the bubble relaxes to a finite-energy remnant whose mass is set by the wall scale and the conserved flux. We interpret these objects as stable flux-supported particle-like states, which we call topolons. Within the admissible sector, the effective energy analysis distinguishes stable collapsed remnants from the contrasting runaway vacuum-decay channel, thereby isolating the sector relevant for cosmological relic formation. At macroscopic distances, topolons behave as heavy localized states and provide a concrete microphysical realization of a dark relic candidate. The detailed cosmological abundance and phenomenology are left for future work.