Stretching and Kibble scaling regimes for Hubble-damped defect networks

The cosmological evolution of topological defect networks can broadly be divided into two stages. At early times they are friction dominated due to particle scattering and therefore nonrelativistic and may either be conformally stretched or evolve in the Kibble regime. At late times they are relativ...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Physical review. D 2016-12, Vol.94 (11), Article 116017
Main Authors: Martins, C. J. A. P., Rybak, I. Yu, Avgoustidis, A., Shellard, E. P. S.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Computer simulation
Damping
Domain walls
Field theory
Mathematical models
Networks
Scale models
Scaling
Stretching
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Summary:The cosmological evolution of topological defect networks can broadly be divided into two stages. At early times they are friction dominated due to particle scattering and therefore nonrelativistic and may either be conformally stretched or evolve in the Kibble regime. At late times they are relativistic and evolve in the well-known linear scaling regime. In this work we show that a sufficiently large Hubble damping (that is a sufficiently fast expansion rate) leads to a linear scaling regime where the network is nonrelativistic. This is therefore another realization of a Kibble scaling regime and also has a conformal stretching regime counterpart which we characterize for the first time. We describe these regimes using analytic arguments in the context of the velocity-dependent one-scale model, and we confirm them using high-resolution 40963 field-theory simulations of domain wall networks. We also use these simulations to improve the calibration of this analytic model for the case of domain walls.
ISSN:2470-0010
2470-0029
DOI:10.1103/PhysRevD.94.116017