Neutral bound states in kink-like theories Original Research Article

In this paper we present an elementary derivation of the semi-classical spectrum of neutral particles in a field theory with kink excitations. In the non-integrable cases, we show that each vacuum state cannot generically support more than two stable particles, since all other neutral exitations are resonances, which will eventually decay. A phase space estimate of these decay rates is also given. This shows that there may be a window of values of the coupling constant where a particle with higher mass is more stable than the one with lower mass. We also discuss the crossing symmetry properties of the semiclassical form factors and the possibility of extracting the elastic part of the kink S-matrix below their inelastic threshold. We present the analysis of theories with symmetric and asymmetric wells, as well as of those with symmetric or asymmetric kinks. Illustrative examples of such theories are provided, among others, by the tricritical Ising model, the double sine-Gordon model and by a class of potentials recently introduced by Bazeia et al.