Related papers: The no-defect conjecture in cosmic crystallography
The scenario of a cosmology with topological defects is surveyed starting from the field theoretic aspects and ending with a description of large-scale structure formation and magnetic field generation. (Lectures delivered at ICTP, Trieste,…
Many theories of the early universe predict the existence of a multiverse where bubbles continuously nucleate giving rise to observers in their interior. In this paper, we point out that topological defects of several dimensionalities will…
Liquid crystals generally support orientational singularities of the director field known as topological defects. These latter modifiy transport properties in their vicinity as if the geometry was non-Euclidean. We present a state of the…
The potential role of cosmic topological defects has raised interest in the astrophysical community for many years now. In this set of notes, we give an introduction to the subject of cosmic topological defects and some of their possible…
Topological phases of matter are ubiquitous in crystals, but less is known about their existence in amorphous systems, that lack long-range order. In this perspective, we review the recent progress made on theoretically defining amorphous…
We consider a perfectly homogeneous and isotropic universe which undergoes a sudden phase transition. If the transition produces topological defects, which we assume, perturbations in the geometry and the cosmic fluid also suddenly appear.…
Many quantum condensed-matter systems, and probably the quantum vacuum of our Universe, are strongly correlated and strongly interacting fermionic systems, which cannot be treated perturbatively. However, physics which emerges in the…
Multiply connected space sections of the universe on a scale smaller than the horizon size can leave an imprint on cosmic microwave background polarization maps, in such a way that the so-called ``circles-in-the-sky'' method can be used to…
``One could imagine that as a result of enormously extended astronomical experience, the entire universe consists of countless identical copies of our Milky Way, that the infinite space can be partitioned into cubes each containing an…
A crystalline topological phase is a topological phase with spatial symmetries. In this work, we give a very general physical picture of such phases: a topological phase with spatial symmetry $G$ (with internal symmetry $G_{\mathrm{int}}…
The topological theory of phase transitions was proposed on the basis of different arguments, the most important of which are: a direct evidence of the relation between topology and phase transitions for some exactly solvable models; an…
Using tools and concepts from contact topology we show that non-vanishing twist implies conservation of the layer structure in cholesteric liquid crystals. This leads to a number of additional topological invariants for cholesteric…
If the topology of the universe is compact we show how it significantly changes our assessment of the naturalness of the observed structure of the universe and the likelihood of its present state of high isotropy and near flatness arising…
We provide a pedagogical overview of defect models of structure formation. We first introduce the concept of topological defect, and describe how to classify them. We then show how defects might be produced in phase transitions in the Early…
Topology forms a cornerstone in modern condensed matter and statistical physics, offering a new framework to classify the phases and phase transitions beyond the traditional Landau paradigm. However, it is widely believed that topological…
We study the phase space of spatially homogeneous and isotropic cosmology in general scalar-tensor theories. A reduction to a two-dimensional phase space is performed when possible-in these situations the phase space is usually a…
During the past two decades, cosmologists turned to particle physics in order to explore the physics of the very early Universe. The main link between the physics of the smallest and largest structures in the Universe is the idea of…
In the context of current particle physics theories, it is quite likely that topological defects may be present in our universe. An observation of these fossils from the early universe would lead to invaluable insight into cosmology and…
Topological phases of matter are often understood and predicted with the help of crystal symmetries, although they don't rely on them to exist. In this chapter we review how topological phases have been recently shown to emerge in amorphous…
The linear cosmological perturbation theory of an almost homogeneous and isotropic perfect fluid universe is reconsidered and formally simplified by introducing new covariant and gauge-invariant variables with physical interpretations on…