Related papers: Defect formation from defect--anti-defect annihila…
Topological defects are common in many everyday systems. In general, they appear if a symmetry is broken at a rapid phase transition. In this article, I explain why it is believed that they should have also been formed in the early universe…
We analyze the spectrum of axions radiated from collapse of domain walls, which have received less attention in the literature. The evolution of topological defects related to the axion models is investigated by performing field-theoretic…
In superconductors with three or more components, time-reversal symmetry may be broken when the inter-component couplings are repulsive, leading to a superconducting state with two-fold degeneracy. When prepared carefully there is a stable…
We point out that the moduli sector of the $(2,2)$ string compactification with its nonperturbatively preserved non-compact symmetries is a fertile framework to study global topological defects, thus providing a natural source for the large…
The production of gravitational vacuum defects and their contribution in energy density of the Universe are discussed. These topological microstructures could be produced as the result of defect creation of the Universe from "nothing" as…
The gravitational field of monopoles, cosmic strings and domain walls is studied in the quadratic gravitational theory $R+\alpha R^2$ with $\alpha |R|\ll 1$, and is compared with the result in Einstein's theory. The metric aquires…
Field theory with instantons can be partially regularized by adding degrees of freedom at some scale. These extra degrees of freedom lead to the appearence of the new topological defects. These defects which we call freckles have some…
Topological defects such as cosmic strings may have been formed at early-universe phase transitions. Direct tests of this idea are impossible, but the mechanism can be elucidated by studying analogous processes in low-temperature…
Domain wall networks in the early universe, formed upon spontaneous breaking of a discrete symmetry, have a rich impact on cosmology. Yet, they remain somewhat unexplored. We introduce a new analytic strategy to understand better the domain…
Vortices are found in a fermion system with repulsive dipole-dipole interactions, trapped by a rotating quasi-two-dimensional harmonic oscillator potential. Such systems have much in common with electrons in quantum dots, where rotation is…
We study topological defects in the Georgi-Machacek model in a hierarchical symmetry breaking in which extra triplets acquire vacuum expectation values before the doublet. We find a possibility of topologically stable non-Abelian domain…
We point out that the moduli sector of the $(2,2)$ string compactification with its nonperturbatively preserved non-compact symmetries is a framework to study global topological defects. Based on the target space modular invariance of the…
We show that sine-Gordon solitons appear in the low-energy effective theory of a domain wall in a U(1) gauge theory with two charged complex scalar fields with masses, if we introduce the Josephson interaction term between the scalar…
Some years ago, Atiyah and Manton described a method to construct approximate Skyrmion solutions from Yang-Mills instantons. Here we present a dynamical realization of this construction using domain walls in a five-dimensional gauge theory.…
We identify instantons representing vacuum decay in a 6-dimensional toy model for string theory flux compactifications, with the two extra dimensions compactified on a sphere. We evaluate the instanton action for tunneling between different…
The experiments on verification of the Kibble-Zurek mechanism showed that topological defects are formed most efficiently in the systems of small size or low (quasi-)dimensionality, whereas in the macroscopic two- and three-dimensional…
Production of gravitational vacuum defects and their contribution to the energy density of our Universe are discussed. These topological microstructures (defects) could be produced in the result of creation of the Universe from "nothing"…
The pair creation of black holes with event horizons of non-trivial topology is described. The spacetimes are all limiting cases of the cosmological $C$ metric. They are generalizations of the $(2+1)$ dimensional black hole and have…
Spacetime theories obtained from perturbative string theory constructions are automatically free of perturbative anomalies, but it is not settled whether they are always free of global anomalies. Here we discuss a possible…
We discuss elementary topological defects in soft magnetic nanoparticles in the thin-film geometry. In the limit dominated by magnetostatic forces the low-energy defects are vortices (winding number n = +1), cross ties (n = -1), and edge…