Related papers: String Fragmentation in Supercooled Confinement an…
We investigate the effect of entanglement between two causally separated open charts in de Sitter space on the spectrum of vacuum fluctuations. We consider a free massive scalar field, and construct the reduced density matrix by tracing out…
We study signatures of cosmic superstring networks containing strings of multiple tensions and Y-junctions, on the cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature and polarisation spectra. Focusing on the crucial role of the string coupling…
Quantum simulators hold the promise of probing central questions of high-energy physics in tunable condensed matter platforms, for instance the physics of confinement. Local defects can be an obstacle in these setups harming their…
Confinement is an ubiquitous phenomenon when matter couples to gauge fields, which manifests itself in a linear string potential between two static charges. Although gauge fields can be integrated out in one dimension, they can mediate…
We study the behaviour and consequences of cosmic string networks in contracting universes. They approximately behave during the collapse phase as a radiation fluids. Scaling solutions describing this are derived and tested against…
We explore the cosmological implications of quantum entanglement between two causally disconnected universes in the multiverse. We first consider two causally separated de Sitter spaces with a state which is initially entangled. We derive…
Superconductivity is inevitably suppressed in reduced dimensionality. Questions of how thin superconducting wires or films can be before they lose their superconducting properties have important technological ramifications and go to the…
We argue that in the context of string theory a large number N of connected degenerate vacua that mix will lead to a ground state with much lower energy, essentially because of the standard level repulsion of quantum theory for the…
The interplay between cosmology and strongly coupled dynamics can yield transient spectral features that vanish at late times, but which may leave behind phenomenological signatures in the spectrum of primordial fluctuations. Of particular…
We explore the cosmological consequences of the superconductivity of QCD axion strings. Axion strings can support a sizeable chiral electric current and charge, which alters their early universe dynamics. Shrinking axion string loops can…
We analyze the decay of ultracold atoms from an optical lattice with loss form a single lattice site. If the initial state is dynamically stable a suitable amount of dissipation can stabilize a Bose-Einstein condensate, such that it remains…
We consider new cosmological solutions with a collapsing, an intermediate and an expanding phase. The boundary between the expanding (collapsing) phase and the intermediate phase is seen by comoving observers as a cosmological past (future)…
A charged superconductiong cosmic string produces an extremely large electric field in its vicinity. This leads to vacuum instability and to the formation of a charged vacuum condensate which screens the electric charge of the string. We…
We outline a connection between scalar quark confinement, a phenomenologically successful concept heretofore lacking fundamental justification, and QCD. Although scalar confinement does not follow from QCD, there is an interesting and close…
Describing the behaviour of strongly interacting particles in the presence of disorder is among the most challenging problems in quantum many-body physics. The controlled setting of cold atom experiments provides a new avenue to address…
In this talk we present a model of the universe in which dark energy is modelled explicitely with both a dynamical quintessence field and a cosmological constant. Our results confirm the possibility of a collapsing universe (for a given…
We analyze static properties of a strongly confined semiflexible polymer, i.e. either trapped in a closed space or compressed by external forces, in an athermal solvent. Like a flexible polymer case, we can resort to an analogy with the…
We study the formation of cosmic strings by confining a stochastic magnetic field into flux tubes in a numerical simulation. We use overdamped evolution in a potential that is minimized when the flux through each face in the simulation…
In string theory, the traditional picture of a Universe that emerges from the inflation of a very small and highly curved space-time patch is a possibility, not a necessity: quite different initial conditions are possible, and not…
Bound-state formation can have a large impact on the dynamics of dark matter freeze-out in the early Universe, in particular for colored coannihilators. We present a general formalism to include an arbitrary number of excited bound states…