Long-lived oscillons from asymmetric bubbles: Existence and stability

The possibility that extremely long-lived, time-dependent, and localized field configurations (``oscillons'') arise during the collapse of asymmetrical bubbles in (2+1)-dimensional φ⁴ models is investigated. It is found that oscillons can develop from a large spectrum of elliptically deformed bubbles. Moreover, we provide numerical evidence that such oscillons are (a) circularly symmetric and (b) linearly stable against small arbitrary radial and angular perturbations. The latter is based on a dynamical approach designed to investigate the stability of nonintegrable time-dependent configurations that is capable of probing slowly growing instabilities not seen through the usual ``spectral'' method.