Speaker
Lauren Pearce
(Penn State University-New Kensington)
Description
Global non-topological solitons (Q-balls) exist when the potential of a
charged scalar field grows slower than quadratically. At zero temperature, this
requires attractive interactions. However, this is not necessary at finite
temperature, as the cubic term ~ T |phi|^3 generically has a negative coefficient.
As a result, non-topological solitons exist at finite temperature in a variety of
models which do not have non-topological solitons at zero temperature. To
illustrate this, we focus on the Higgs boson (both in the Standard Model and in
extensions), which requires generalizing our results to gauged Q-balls.
