Related papers: Formation of Topological Defects with Explicit Sym…
Topological defects are ubiquitous in physics. Whenever a symmetry breaking phase transition occurs, topological defects may form. The best known examples are vortex lines in type II super conductors or in liquid Helium, and declination…
Symmetry-breaking phase transitions are ubiquitous in condensed matter systems and in quantum field theories. There is also good reason to believe that they feature in the very early history of the Universe. At many such transitions…
Formation and evolution of topological defects in course of non-equilibrium symmetry breaking phase transitions is of wide interest in many areas of physics, from cosmology through condensed matter to low temperature physics. Its study in…
We analyze the evolution of scalar and gauge fields during first order phase transitions and show how the Kibble mechanism for the formation of topological defects emerges from the underlying dynamics, paying particular attention to…
In cosmological first-order phase transitions, the progress of true-vacuum bubbles is expected to be significantly retarded by the interaction between the bubble wall and the hot plasma. It has been claimed that this leads to a significant…
In these lectures, I review cosmological phase transitions and the topological aspects of spontaneous symmetry breaking. I then discuss the formation of walls, strings and monopoles during phase transitions including lattice based studies…
When a symmetry gets spontaneously broken in a phase transition, topological defects are typically formed. The theoretical picture of how this happens in a breakdown of a global symmetry, the Kibble-Zurek mechanism, is well established and…
We discuss formation of cosmic strings associated with a spontaneously broken approximate $U(1)$ symmetry by performing classical field-theoretical simulations. An original $U(1)$ symmetry is explicitly broken down to its subgroup $Z_N$…
We show that the mechanism of vortex-antivortex pair production via field oscillations, earlier proposed by two of us for systems with first order transitions in presence of explicit symmetry breaking, is in fact very generally applicable.…
We extend work done previously concerning the formation of vortices in a U(1)->1 gauge theory at a first order phase transition to the symmetry breaking SU(2)xU(1)->U(1). It is shown that the collision of bubbles, appearing at the phase…
We carry out numerical simulation of the formation of U(1) global vortices in a first order phase transition in 2+1 dimensions in the presence of small explicit symmetry breaking. Bubbles of broken symmetry phase are randomly nucleated,…
Topological defects are produced during phase transitions in the very early Universe. They arise in most unified theories of strong, weak and electromagnetic interactions. These lectures focus on the role of topological defects in…
Within the context of a first-order phase transition in the early Universe, we study the collision process for vacuum bubbles expanding in a plasma. The effects of the plasma are simulated by introducing a damping term in the equations of…
Within the context of first order phase transitions in the early universe, we study the influence of a coupling between the (global U(1)) scalar driving the transition and the rest of the matter content of the theory. The effect of the…
In an Abelian gauge symmetry, spontaneously broken at a first order phase transition, we investigate the evolution of two and three bubbles of the broken symmetry phase. The full field equations are evolved and we concentrate in particular…
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 study collisions between pairs of bubbles nucleated in an ambient false vacuum. For the first time, we include the effects of small initial (quantum) fluctuations around the instanton profiles describing the most likely initial bubble…
We study the formation of vortices in a U(1) gauge theory following a first-order transition proceeding by bubble nucleation, in particular the effect of a low velocity of expansion of the bubble walls. To do this, we use a two-dimensional…
We consider quantum phase transitions with global symmetry breakings that result in the formation of topological defects. We evaluate the number densities of kinks, vortices, and monopoles that are produced in $d=1,2,3$ spatial dimensions…
We study random bubble lattices which can be produced by processes such as first order phase transitions, and derive characteristics that are important for understanding the percolation of distinct varieties of bubbles. The results are…