Mysterious Q Balls -Created in the Heat of the Newborn Universe: Are They SciFi or SciFact?

Q-balls zoom through the Universe, according to CERN physicist Brian Cox, vaporizing stars and flouting the laws of physics. Each one is like a new universe in a nutshell. Inside a Q-ball, the familiar forces that hold our world together don't exist, which means that a single Q-ball can eat the heart out of a super-dense star,causing it to self-destruct in an almighty cosmic explosion.

This was the scientific premise of the scifi thriller, Sunshine, directed by Danny Boyle (Trainspotting, The Beach). That's the fiction.

The fact is that a Q-ball would travel through a light star like the sun like a bullet through vapor. If a Q-ball drifts into the heart of a super-dense object such as a neutron star, however, it could begin to eat away at it's core like a cancer, until the star is no longer massive enough to maintain itself and explodes in a violent explosion. Such explosions, known as gamma ray bursts, are seen in the Universe, although their cause is as yet unknown.

No one has ever seen one of these oddballs coined some 20 years ago by Sidney Coleman, a physicist at Harvard University. But a leading theory of particle physics predicts that they were created in the heat of the newborn Universe-and that they may still be common today. Finding Q-ball footprints would resolve a host of cosmic mysteries, including the nature of much of the dark matter that astronomers are convinced pervades the Universe, and perhaps the origin of the brilliant but unpredictable gamma-ray bursts.

If heavy Q-balls did form in the early Universe, they would still be around today. In that case, they could make up at least some of the unidentified dark matter that loiters around galaxies all over the Universe. We know this dark matter is there because its gravity distorts the paths of visible stars and galaxies.

The moment of truth may not be far away. The most powerful accelerator ever, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), may provide the answer. If there are sightings of supersymmetry mirror particles in the debris of collisions, the case for Q-balls-ancient or still living-will be much more compelling. And the nutshell universes in which nature's laws break down will be science fact, rather than science fiction. In short, don't throw away your sunscreen.

“A sound explanation may exist for the explosive birth of our Universe; but if it does, science cannot find out what the explanation is. The scientist’s pursuit of the past ends in the moment of creation. This is an exceedingly strange development, unexpected by all but the theologians. They have always accepted the word of the Bible: In the beginning God created heaven and earth... At this moment it seems as though science will never be able to raise the curtain on the mystery of creation. For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.” — Robert Jastrow, God and the Astronomers, 1978, W.W. Norton, NY, pp115-116, in Moreland J.P. ed., The Creation Hypothesis, 1994, pp292-293.

The author of the quoted article, "Mysterious Q Balls -Created in the Heat of the Newborn Universe: Are They SciFi or SciFact?", a person called Casey Kazan, wrote in his piece:

“Inside a Q-ball, the familiar forces that hold our world together don't exist…”

As is the case with far too many popular articles that purportedly deal with physics topics, this quote is inaccurate, and very misleading. It is so misleading that some posters here, in attempting to discuss the article, in turn wrote passages such as

[ A q-ball ] “is a region of space where the laws of physics are repealed…”

and

[ a q-ball ] “is in the physical world but ... does not adhere to the laws of the physical world…”

None of this is remotely accurate, although the fault lies with the author of the misleading “popular” article and not with the freepers who merely took him at his word. Q-balls do not "depart" in any way from established facts of physics, and q-balls are not some “new” attempt to “get funding,” and, in fact, they aren’t new in any sense at all. They are explicit mathematical solutions to the differential equations of motion of certain quantum field theories describing the interaction dynamics of specific bosonic fields, first worked out more than 40 years ago. The name “q ball” is due to the fact that these particular mathematical solutions exhibit spherical symmetry (hence “ball”) and possess a non-vanishing type of “charge,” which is often designated in physics by the letter “q.” (The charge in this case is not the same as electrical charge.)

The first q ball-type soution to a quantum field theory was derived in 1968, but the first physicist to work out all the mathematical details required to prove that such states are stable against the phenomenon of quantum mechanical tunneling was Sidney Coleman at Harvard in 1986 (he used a clever technique known as the “thin shell approximation” with which he derived the analytical expressions that comprise his solution, which he named "q ball"). Sidney died a few years ago, but his calculations, clearly presented in published articles, have been independently reproduced by hundreds of physicists around the world since then (including different derivations than the original). There is absolutely nothing controversial about any of this. It is completely inaccurate to imply, as the author of the “popular” article does, that ordinary forces “don’t exist” in a q-ball. On the contrary, the particle field configuration called a q-ball behaves the way it does precisely because of the laws of physics. Due to the peculiar (but theoretically and experimentally well-established) quantum mechanical properties of bosons (physical states that possess integral values of intrinsic angular momentum, also known as spin), it turns out, as Sidney showed years ago, that certain solutions to the field equations can arise that describe bound configurations of bosons which are characterized by a potential function that has a value smaller than would be the case for the corresponding free (i.e., non-binding) potential. Thus, the bound state is the lowest energy state - unusual, but fully consistent with established properties of the forces that determine the dynamics of elementary particles. It will be interesting to see if these theoretical solutions can be experimentally confirmed.

In the meantime, it is very unfortunate that the author of the popular article so completely mangled this point, misleading some posters here as a result. Many scientists have had the experience of popular journalists messing up descriptions of their work with absurd linguistic flights of fancy - this is yet another example.

Thanks for that.

My pleasure.

Hope you stick around. Cheers!

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