Q-ball Metamorphosis

Abstract

Flat directions in the minimal supersymmetric standard model are known to deform into non-topological solitons, Q-balls, which generally possess both baryon and lepton asymmetries. We investigate how Q-balls evolve if some of the constituent fields of the flat direction decay into light species. It is found that the Q-balls takes a new configuration whose energy per charge slightly increases due to the decay. Specifically, we show that all the stable Q-balls eventually transform into pure B-balls via the decay into neutrinos.