Quantum energies of solitons with different topological charges

Abstract: The vacuum polarization energy is the leading quantum correction to the classical energy of a soliton. We study this energy for two-component solitons in one space dimension as a function of the soliton's topological charge. We find that both the classical and the vacuum polarization energies are linear functions of the topological charge with a small offset. Because the combination of the classical and quantum offsets determines the binding energies, either all higher charge solitons are energetically bound or they are all unbound, depending on model parameters. This linearity persists even when the field configurations are very different from those of isolated solitons, and would not be apparent from an analysis of their bound state spectra alone.