Decay of Affleck-Dine condensates with application to Q-balls

Analytical and numerical estimates show that a charged Affleck-Dine condensate will fracture into Q-balls only when the Hubble time is significantly larger than the inverse soft-breaking mass of the field in question. This would generally imply that the decay of the field into light fermions will compete with Q-ball formation. We will show that for typical flat directions the large field value will significantly suppress decays of the condensate to fermions even if no baryon charge asymmetry exists. We will consider the details of the decay process for a condensate that does carry charge, and show that it is qualitatively different from that of an uncharged condensate. Finally, we will consider the possibility of resonant production of heavy bosons. We will show that this can have a strong effect on the condensate. Contrary to intuition, however, our results indicate that boson production would actually assist Q-ball formation in condensates with significant charge.