Collapse instability and staccato decay of oscillons in various dimensions

Abstract

Oscillons are long-lived, slowly radiating solutions of nonlinear classical relativistic field theories. Recently it was discovered that in one spatial dimension their decay may proceed in "staccato" bursts. Here we perform a systematic numerical study to demonstrate that although this behaviour is not confined to one spatial dimension, it quickly becomes unobservable when the dimension of space is increased, at least for the class of potentials considered here. To complete the picture we also present explicit results on the dimension dependence of the collapse instability observed for three-dimensional oscillons.