Long-Lived Time-Dependent Remnants During Cosmological Symmetry Breaking: From Inflation to the Electroweak Scale
Abstract
Through a detailed numerical investigation in three spatial dimensions, we demonstrate that long-lived time-dependent field configurations emerge dynamically during symmetry breaking in an expanding de Sitter spacetime. We investigate two situations: a single scalar field with a double-well potential and the bosonic sector of an SU(2) non-Abelian Higgs model. For the single scalar, we show that large-amplitude oscillon configurations emerge spontaneously and persist to contribute about 1.2% of the energy density of the universe. We also show that for a range of parameters, oscillon lifetimes are enhanced by the expansion and that this effect is a result of parametric resonance. For the SU(2) case, we see about 4% of the final energy density in oscillons.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1004.4658,
title = {Long-Lived Time-Dependent Remnants During Cosmological Symmetry Breaking: From Inflation to the Electroweak Scale},
author = {Marcelo Gleiser and Noah Graham and Nikitas Stamatopoulos},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1004.4658},
year = {2010}
}
Comments
10 pages, RevTex4, 6 figures; v2: expanded SU(2) model section, added 2 figures, added one section, improved overall presentation and updated references, accepted for publication in Phys. Rev. D. Results remain the same