Abstract
In relativistic quantum field theories, compact objects of interacting bosons can become stable owing to conservation of an additive quantum number . Discovering such balls propagating in the universe would confirm supersymmetric extensions of the standard model and may shed light on the mysteries of dark matter, but no unambiguous experimental evidence exists. We have created long-lived -ball solitons in superfluid , where the role of the ball is played by a Bose-Einstein condensate of magnon quasiparticles. The principal qualitative attribute of a ball is observed experimentally: its propagation in space together with the self-created potential trap. Additionally, we show that this system allows for a quantitatively accurate representation of the -ball Hamiltonian. Our ball belongs to the class of the Friedberg-Lee-Sirlin balls with an additional neutral field , which is provided by the orbital part of the Nambu-Goldstone mode. Multiple balls can be created in the experiment, and we have observed collisions between them. This set of features makes the magnon condensates in superfluid a versatile platform for studies of -ball dynamics and interactions in three spatial dimensions.
- Received 31 August 2017
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.97.014518
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