Yang-Mills stars in Higgsed non-Abelian dark matter

Abstract

Bosonic field theories with non-linear interactions alongside gravity, generally admit bound states known as solitons. Depending upon the spin nature of the field, they can even carry macroscopic intrinsic spin polarization. Focusing on the Higgsed SU(2) Yang-Mills theory, we describe polarized solitons in non-Abelian theories with a heavy Higgs, which we refer to as 'Yang-Mills stars'. Owing to both kinds of self-interactions; repulsive ones arising due to the Yang-Mills structure, while attractive ones arising due to the Higgs exchange; we can have a diverse zoo of solitons. Depending upon various parameters of the theory such as the mass of the Yang-Mills vector fields m, mass of the dark Higgs field Mϕ, and the gauge coupling constant g, these objects can be astrophysically large with varying size and mass, and carry large intrinsic spin and/or isospin giving rise to interesting phenomenological implications. Even for vector mass as large as m 10 eV, we can accommodate gauge couplings g 10 −4 − 10 −5 , still evading Bullet cluster constraints. For these parameters, we get astrophysically long lived solitons having radii as large as rs ∼ 10 5 R and masses Ms ∼ 10M , carrying Ms/m ∼ 10 66 amounts of intrinsic spin/isospin polarization.

Small-scale structure in vector dark matter

“…In such self-interaction supported solitons, linearly polarized solitons have a lower energy compared to the circularly polarized ones (at fixed particle number). As in the case of scalars (see for example, [47,48]), it will be possible to construct non-relativistic solitons with a combination of self-interactions and gravity [49].…”