  Skyrmions are extended field configurations, initially proposed to describe
baryons as topological solitons in an effective field theory of mesons. We
investigate and confirm the existence of skyrmions within the electroweak
sector of the Standard Model and study their properties. We find that the
interplay of the electroweak sector with a dynamical Higgs field and the Skyrme
term leads to a non-trivial vacuum structure with the skyrmion and perturbative
vacuum sectors separated by a finite energy barrier. We identify dimension-8
operators that stabilise the electroweak skyrmion as a spatially localised
soliton field configuration with finite size. Such operators are induced
generically by a wide class of UV models. To calculate the skyrmion energy and
radius we use a neural network method. Electroweak skyrmions are
non-topological solitons but are exponentially long lived, and we find that the
electroweak skyrmion is a viable dark matter candidate. While the skyrmion
production cross section at collider experiments is suppressed, measuring the
size of the Skyrme term in multi-Higgs-production processes at high-energy
colliders is a promising avenue to probe the existence of electroweak
skyrmions.
