Understanding oscillons: standing waves in a ball

Oscillons are localised long-lived pulsating states in the three-dimensional $\phi^4$ theory. We gain insight into the spatio-temporal structure and bifurcation of the oscillons by studying time-periodic solutions in a ball of a finite radius. A sequence of weakly localised {\it Bessel waves} -- nonlinear standing waves with the Bessel-like $r$-dependence -- is shown to extend from eigenfunctions of the linearised operator. The lowest-frequency Bessel wave serves as a starting point of a branch of periodic solutions with exponentially localised cores and small-amplitude tails decaying slowly towards the surface of the ball. A numerical continuation of this branch gives rise to the energy-frequency diagram featuring a series of resonant spikes. We show that the standing waves associated with the resonances are born in the period-multiplication bifurcations of the Bessel waves with higher frequencies. The energy-frequency diagram for a sufficiently large ball displays sizeable intervals of stability against spherically-symmetric perturbations.Comment: 13 pages, 12 figure

Monopole Vacuum in Non-Abelian Theories

It is shown that, in the theory of interacting Yang -Mills fields and a Higgs field, there is a topological degeneracy of Bogomol'nyi-Prasad-Sommerfield (BPS) monopoles and that there arises, in this case, a chromoelectric monopole characterized by a new topological variable that describes transitions between topological states of the monopole in the Minkowski space (in just the same way as an instanton describes such transitions in the Euclidean space). The limit of an infinitely large mass of the Higgs field at a finite density of the BPS monopole is considered as a model of the stable vacuum in the pure Yang-Mills theory. It is shown that, in QCD, such a monopole vacuum may lead to a rising potential, a topological confinement and an additional mass of the $\eta_0$ meson. The relationship between the result obtained here for the generating functional of perturbation theory and Faddeev-Popov integral is discussed