Flat-top oscillons in an expanding universe

Flat-top oscillons in an expanding universe. Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use. The MIT Faculty has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters. Oscillons are extremely long lived, oscillatory, spatially localized field configurations that arise from generic initial conditions in a large number of nonlinear field theories. With an eye towards their cosmological implications, we investigate their properties in an expanding universe. We (1) provide an analytic solution for one-dimensional oscillons (for the models under consideration) and discuss their generalization to three dimensions, (2) discuss their stability against long wavelength perturbations, and (3) estimate the effects of expansion on their shapes and lifetimes. In particular, we discuss a new, extended class of oscillons with surprisingly flat tops. We show that these flat-topped oscillons are more robust against collapse instabilities in (3 þ 1) dimensions than their usual counterparts. Unlike the solutions found in the small amplitude analysis, the width of these configurations is a nonmonotonic function of their amplitudes.