Related papers: Testing cosmological defect formation in the labor…
The idea of GUT implies that the universe went through a series of phase transitions during which topological defects are expected to form. We investigate here the genericity of cosmic strings formation in realistic SUSY GUTs models. We…
An inhomogeneous version of pre--Big Bang cosmology emerges, within string theory, from quite generic initial conditions, provided they lie deeply inside the weak-coupling, low-curvature regime. Large-scale homogeneity, flatness, and…
Classical defects (monopoles, vortices, etc.) are a characteristic consequence of many phase transitions of quantum fields. Most likely these include transitions in the early universe and such defects would be expected to be present in the…
Topological defects are involved in a plethora of physical and astrophysical phenomena. In these lectures, I will review the r\^ ole they could play in the large-scale structure formation and the anisotropies of the cosmic microwave…
One of the simplest extensions of the Standard Model is the Higgs portal extension involving a dark Higgs. Dark sectors that include dark matter candidates, WIMPs, axions, and dark photons, can naturally have this type of interaction, where…
From theoretical point of view and not being in contradiction with current observational data, the cosmic strings should have fundamentally different origin and are characterized by wide range of energies. The paper is devoted to search for…
A mechanism for generating metric perturbations in inflationary models is considered. Long-wavelength inhomogeneities of light scalar fields in a decoupled sector may give rise to superhorizon fluctuations of couplings and masses in the…
We study the behavior of non-relativistic quantum particles interacting with different potentials in the space-times generated by a cosmic string and a global monopole. We find the energy spectra in the presence of these topological defects…
Motivated by the study of cosmological phase transitions, our understanding of the formation of topological defects during spontaneous symmetry-breaking and the associated non-equilibrium field theory has recently changed. Experiments have…
The canonical Monte-Carlo algorithm for simulating the production of string-like topological defects at a phase transition is extended by introducing a distribution of domain sizes. A strong correlation is found between the fraction in the…
Cosmic strings can arise in hidden sector models with a spontaneously broken Abelian symmetry group. We have studied the couplings of the Standard Model fields to these so-called dark strings in the companion paper. Here we survey the…
Scalar electrodynamics can be used to investigate the formation of cosmic strings in the early universe. We present the results of lattice Monte Carlo simulations of an effective three-dimensional U(1)+Higgs theory that describes the…
We examine string (vortex) formation at a quench for a weakly-coupled global U(1) theory when the excitation spectrum is non-relativistic. It is so similar to vortex production in the corresponding relativistic plasma as to reinforce…
Liquid crystals have proven to provide a versatile experimental and theoretical platform for studying topological objects such as vortices, skyrmions, and hopfions. In parallel, in hard condensed matter physics, the concept of topological…
We propose novel structure formation scenarios based on a non-singular higher curvature cosmological model. The model is motivated by the $R^2$ coupling of a scalar field appearing in the string theory, and in our scenarios the universe has…
We give an overview over models in which cosmic rays above 1 EeV = 10**(18) eV are produced by the decay of supermassive "X" particles released from topological defects possibly created in cosmological phase transitions. We note that, for…
Zurek suggested [Nature 317 (1985) 505] that the Kibble mechanism, through which topological defects such as cosmic strings are believed to have been created in the early Universe, can also result in the formation of topological defects in…
Global topological defects produce nonzero stress-energy throughout spacetime, and as a result can have observable gravitational influence on surrounding matter. Gravitational effects of global strings are used to place bounds on their…
We study the generation of cosmological perturbations during the Hagedorn phase of string gas cosmology. Using tools of string thermodynamics we provide indications that it may be possible to obtain a nearly scale-invariant spectrum of…
Kinks, vortices, monopoles are extended objects, or defects, of quantum origin with topologically non-trivial properties and macroscopic behavior. They are described in Quantum Field Theory in terms of non-homogeneous boson condensation. I…