Recipes for Oscillon Longevity

Understand

Oscillons are localized states of scalar fields sustained by self interactions.

• They decay by emitting classical radiation, but their lifetimes are surprisingly large.
• We revisit the reasons behind their longevity, aiming at how the shape of the scalar potential $V(\phi)$ determines the lifetime.
• The corpuscular picture, where the oscillon is identified with a bound state of a large number of field quanta, allows to understand lifetimes of order of $10^3$ cycles in generic potentials.