Quantum Corrections to Deep Bags

Abstract

Nontopological solitons, or ``bags,'' can arise when fermions acquire their mass through a Yukawa coupling to some scalar field. Bags have played an important role in models of baryons, nuclei, and more recently, in the idea that a Higgs condensate may form around a very heavy top quark. It has been claimed that deep bags, which correspond to tightly-bound states of fermions, will form when the Yukawa coupling is strong. Quantum corrections, however, are significant in this regime. We examine the effects of these quantum corrections on the formation of nontopological solitons in an exactly solvable large-$N$ model. We find that quantum bags differ dramatically from those of the classical theory. In particular, for large Yukawa coupling, the bags remain shallow and the fermions weakly bound.