Derrick virial identity 2026-09-28
Stationarity of a static solution under Derrick scaling requires . This necessary relation among the separately scaling energy terms is the Derrick virial identity.
Write the scalar field energy as , where
Under the Derrick scaling , a change of variables gives
A finite-energy solution of the Euler-Lagrange equation is stationary under this admissible variation. The Derrick virial identity is therefore
The static field equation is , so integration gives
The polynomial before is nonnegative and vanishes, so requiring the minimum to be zero fixes . Hence the vacuum manifold is
which has three elements. A finite-energy scalar-field kink can join only adjacent vacua: a solution cannot cross the intermediate vacuum at finite because its first integral would have there and the Picard-Lindelof theorem would make it constant. There are therefore four oriented topological sectors,
comprising two increasing kinks and their two antikinks. Symmetry under and spatial reflection generates all four from one profile.
For the sector, completing the square gives the Bogomolny bound
Equality holds for the Bogomolny equation
With , this becomes the logistic differential equation . Translation invariance supplies an arbitrary center , and the explicit kink in a phi-six model is
It tends to and at the two spatial ends and saturates the bound. Its mass is consequently
A classical field-theory soliton is a smooth, spatially localized, finite-energy solution which retains its identity under time evolution and is stable against small perturbations, commonly because of a topological charge or a balance between energy terms with different scaling behavior.
For a static field write
where
Under the Derrick scaling , a change of variables gives
A static solution must be stationary under this variation, so the Derrick virial identity is
All three energies are nonnegative. For , every coefficient is nonpositive and the coefficient of the strictly positive of any nonconstant field is negative. The identity is impossible. Thus, when the quartic-gradient term is available,
For or , the term has the opposite sign to at least one other term and the Derrick theorem does not rule out a soliton. If from the outset, the identity reduces to , recovering the stronger standard obstruction for .