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Peter E. D. Leith

Publications and source records attributed to Peter E. D. Leith.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

Particlelike solutions of the Einstein-Dirac-Higgs equations: ground, excited, and many-fermion states

We present an extended study of the gravitationally localized soliton-like solutions to the minimally-coupled Einstein-Dirac-Higgs equations, embedded in asymptotically Minkowski spacetimes. The equations of motion describing these Yukawa-coupled Dirac stars are generalized to any even number of constituent fermions. We first expand the discussion of two-fermion ground-state solutions initially analyzed in Leith et al. [Phys. Rev. D. 107, 106020 (2023)]. Upon extending our analysis to excited states and many-fermion states, we find that both exhibit different behaviors to their two-fermion ground-state counterparts. In these excited states and many-fermion states, the Higgs field may exhibit stepwise increases and at times decrease within the soliton, which has not been seen for the two-fermion ground states. We also propose the potential cause of a significant degree of ADM-to-fermion mass disparity, which is present in states with strong Yukawa-coupling.

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'Stealth' singularities from self-gravitating fermions

We present a new analytic solution to the Einstein-Dirac equations formulated by Finster, Smoller, and Yau [Phys. Rev. D 59, 104020 (1999)] to describe the stationary states of a pair of gravitationally interacting neutral fermions. The fermions' wavefunction in our analytic solution, as in their numerical ones, is both exponentially localized and normalizable. However, our solution differs from theirs in two key respects: it features a naked spacetime singularity at the origin, and the gravitational (Arnowitt-Deser-Misner) mass of the localized object is zero, making it gravitationally undetectable to an external observer. This is despite the arbitrarily large mass of the constituent fermions. This unexpected result may have significant implications for astronomy and cosmology, as it gives a mechanism by which mass could become 'hidden' during the universe's evolution.

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Gravitationally localized states of two neutral fermions interacting with a Higgs field

We present localized 'particle-like' states composed of a pair of neutral fermions interacting with a scalar Higgs field and the metric of spacetime, extending the Einstein-Dirac formalism introduced by Finster, Smoller, and Yau [Phys. Rev. D 59, 104020 (1999)]. We demonstrate that, when the coupling between the fermions and the Higgs field is strong, there is a class of states in which the total (ADM) mass no longer increases proportionally to the mass of the constituent fermions; indeed it decreases. This phenomenon enables fermionic particles with much larger masses than in the Higgs-free case to form localized states.

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Nonlinear effects in the excited states of many-fermion Einstein-Dirac solitons

We present an analysis of excited-state solutions for a gravitationally localized system consisting of a filled shell of high-angular-momentum fermions, using the Einstein-Dirac formalism introduced by Finster, Smoller, and Yau [Phys. Rev. D 59, 104020 (1999)]. We show that, even when the particle number is relatively low ($N_f\ge 6$), the increased nonlinearity in the system causes a significant deviation in behavior from the two-fermion case. Excited-state solutions can no longer be uniquely identified by the value of their central redshift, with this multiplicity producing distortions in the characteristic spiraling forms of the mass-radius relations. We discuss the connection between this effect and the internal structure of solutions in the relativistic regime.

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Fermion self-trapping in the optical geometry of Einstein-Dirac solitons

We analyze gravitationally localized states of multiple fermions with high angular momenta, in the formalism introduced by Finster, Smoller, and Yau [Phys Rev. D 59, 104020 (1999)]. We show that the resulting soliton-like wave functions can be naturally interpreted in terms of a form of self-trapping, where the fermions become localized on shells the locations of which correspond to those of `bulges' in the optical geometry created by their own energy density.

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