The emergence of electroweak Skyrmions through Higgs bosons

Criado, Juan Carlos; Khoze, Valentin V.; Spannowsky, Michael

Abstract

Skyrmions are extended field configurations, initially proposed to describe baryons as topological solitons in an effective field theory of mesons. We investigate and confirm the existence of skyrmions within the electroweak sector of the Standard Model and study their properties. We find that the interplay of the electroweak sector with a dynamical Higgs field and the Skyrme term leads to a non-trivial vacuum structure with the skyrmion and perturbative vacuum sectors separated by a finite energy barrier. We identify dimension-8 operators that stabilise the electroweak skyrmion as a spatially localised soliton field configuration with finite size. Such operators are induced generically by a wide class of UV models. To calculate the skyrmion energy and radius we use a neural network method. Electroweak skyrmions are non-topological solitons but are exponentially long lived, and we find that the electroweak skyrmion is a viable dark matter candidate. While the skyrmion production cross section at collider experiments is suppressed, measuring the size of the Skyrme term in multi-Higgs-production processes at high-energy colliders is a promising avenue to probe the existence of electroweak skyrmions.

Citation

Criado, J. C., Khoze, V. V., & Spannowsky, M. (2021). The emergence of electroweak Skyrmions through Higgs bosons. Journal of High Energy Physics, 2021(3), Article 162. https://doi.org/10.1007/jhep03%282021%29162

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Feb 3, 2021
• Online Publication Date: Mar 16, 2021
• Publication Date: 2021-03
• Deposit Date: Apr 13, 2021
• Publicly Available Date: Apr 13, 2021
• Journal: Journal of High Energy Physics
• Print ISSN: 1126-6708
• Electronic ISSN: 1029-8479
• Publisher: Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati (SISSA)
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 2021
• Issue: 3
• Article Number: 162
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/jhep03%282021%29162
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1277649
• Related Public URLs: https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.07694