against tunnelling to lower-energy configurations) come from Sidney Coleman. Occurrence in nature It has been theorized that dark matter might consist of Q-balls (Frieman et al. 1988, Kusenko et al. 1997) and that Q-balls might play a role in baryogenesis, i.e. the origin of the matter that fills the universe (Dodelson et al. 1990, Enqvist et al. 1997). Interest in Q-balls was stimulated by the suggestion that they arise generically in supersymmetric field theories (Kusenko 1997), so if nature really is fundamentally supersymmetric, then Q-balls might have been created in the early universe and still exist in the cosmos today. It has been hypothesised that the early universe had many energy lumps that consisted of Q-balls. When these eventually interacted with each other they ‘’popped’’, i.e., dispersed, creating more matter particles than antimatter particles and explaining why matter predominates in the visible universe. It should be possible to verify this by detecting gravitational waves propagated by the ''popping'' of the Q-balls. Fiction In the movie Sunshine, the Sun is undergoing a premature death. The movie's science adviser, scientist Brian Cox, proposed "infection" with a Q-ball as the mechanism for this death, but this is mentioned only in the commentary tracks and not in the movie itself. In the fictional universe of Orion's Arm, Q-balls are one of the speculated sources for the large amounts of antimatter used by certain groups. In the TV series Sliders, Q-Ball is the nickname given by Rembrandt Brown (Crying Man) to Quinn Mallory. References External links Cosmic anarchists , by Hazel Muir. A popular account of the proposal of Alexander Kusenko. Hypothetical particles Quantum field theory Solitons