More on Q-Balls

[Tachyon]

Sounds cool I have a few simple questions;

- What would the appearance of a Q-ball be?

They're spherically symmetric and charged, so they interact readily with matter. You probably wouldn't want to get close to them since they're gamma ray emitters.

Q-matter, like regular matter, has a radius depending upon the number of particles, and a spectrum of vibrations about its equilibrium. These surface waves lead to a range of low-lying excited states.

The internal excitation (phonon) spectrum is proportional to , whereas the surface wave frequency is proportional to . Upon catalyzing baryon decay a certain amount of energy is converted to phonons via momentum conservation. And as I've mentioned earlier, you can scatter protons (quarks) off a Q-ball to produce leptons (electrons).

- How could you (theoretically) make one?

In the LHC or any other hadron collider at the TeV scale, depending on the scale of supersymmetry-breaking soft masses. In particular, once we find squarks and sleptons we can combine them to get the "flat directions" that produce Q-balls.

Another way to do so is to obtain the color-triplet Higgsinos from the electroweak Higgs doublets (this of course, assumes there is more than one Higg's boson). Once you have the color-triplets, you can pair produce them in a hadron collider. It's even possible to find them as cosmological relics on Earth (although the likelihood is constrained to be small).

- What would the density of a Q-ball be? More or less than magmatter?

Less, it's essentially like normal matter but with a very high charge. A Q-ball of a few microns in diameter would be about 100 tons.

In fact, it's very good at storing charge, as its energy is proportional to rather than Q, meaning the larger the Q-ball the more energetically preferable storing charge there is.

Of course, as you start getting very strong charges you start electrostatic ally dissociating matter!

- What would happen if you dropped one onto a planet? For that matter what happens if you drop monopoles? Will they sink to the core and slowly break the world apart?

Both would tend to sink to the core and eat matter until the radiation pressure from the annihilated matter regulates the infall of matter. The rate of power production is proportional to surface area which is proportional to the number of particles.

Monopoles would tend to travel along the magnetic lines, but otherwise do the same thing. However, they don't tend to clump up the way Q-balls do, so they would be less efficient than a very large Q-ball.