Cosmological scaling of precursor domain walls
Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: Domain wall (DW) networks have a large impact on cosmology and present interesting dynamics that can be controlled by various scaling regimes. In the first stage after spontaneous breaking of the discrete symmetry, the network is seeded with “DW precursors,” the zeros of a tachyonic field. At sufficiently weak coupling, this stage can be quite long. The network is then driven to a nonrelativistic scaling regime; in flat spacetime the correlation length grows like L ∼ t κ with κ = 1 / 2 . We focus on the precursor regime in cosmology, assuming a power law scale factor a ∝ t α . We obtain the scaling exponent as a function of the external parameter, κ ( α ) , by explicit computation in 1 + 1 and 2 + 1 dimensions, and find a smooth transition from nonrelativistic scaling with κ ≃ 1 / 2 for α ≲ 1 / 2 to DW gas regime κ ≃ α for α ≳ 1 / 2 , confirming previous arguments. The precise form of the transition κ ( α ) is surprisingly independent of dimension, suggesting that similar results should also be valid in 3 + 1 dimensions. Published by the American Physical Society 2024
Language: English
Subfield: Astronomy and Astrophysics
Field: Physics and Astronomy
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Funders: National Science Foundation, Centres de Recerca de Catalunya, Generalitat de Catalunya, Narodowe Centrum Nauki, Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación, Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics, Kyoto University, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Institut de Física d'Altes Energies, Institute for Computational and Data Sciences, Pennsylvania State University, Agencia Estatal de Investigación
OpenAlex ID: W4402678561