Higgs Balls: Building Thermal Non-Topological Solitons with the Higgs Field

Scalar fields that carry either a global or gauged conserved charge may form non-topological solitons if the energy of an extended field configuration is less than the energy of an equivalent number of free quanta. We argue that thermal corrections can allow for such non-topological solitons in many models, including in some which lack the necessary attractive interactions at zero temperature. As an illustration, we consider the HIggs field, demonstrating that although such solitons do not exist in the Standard Model, they can exist in BSM extensions.