Related papers: Formation of Topological Defects
We study the formation of topological defects in nonequilibrium phase transitions of both classical and quantum field theory. We examine three model systems. 1). The phase transition of a quantum scalar field in a FRW universe is analyzed…
Spontaneous symmetry breaking plays a pivotal role in physics ranging from the emergence of elementary particles to the phase transitions of matter. The spontaneous breaking of continuous time translation symmetry leads to a novel state of…
How topological defects affect the dynamics of particles hopping between lattice sites of a distorted, two-dimensional crystal is addressed. Perturbation theory and numerical simulations show that weak, short-ranged topological disorder…
Ordered phases resulting from spontaneously broken continuous symmetries are effectively described by sigma models of maps to the coset space of Goldstone modes. A classic problem is to classify the topological sectors of the sigma model.…
In condensed matter physics and related areas, topological defects play important roles in phase transitions and critical phenomena. Homotopy theory facilitates the classification of such topological defects. After a pedagogic introduction…
These lecture notes discuss several topics in the physics of cosmic structure formation starting from the evolution of small-amplitude fluctuations in the radiation-dominated era. The topics include relativistic cosmological perturbation…
A salient feature of topological phases are surface states and many of the widely studied physical properties are directly tied to their existence. Although less explored, a variety of topological phases can however similarly be…
By resorting to some results in quantum field theories with spontaneous breakdown of symmetry we show that an explanation based on microscopic dynamics can be given of the fact that topological defect formation is observed during the…
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.…
The Standard Model of particle physics and the $\Lambda$CDM model of cosmology provide an incomplete description of our Universe. Both models face challenges, including explaining the nature of dark matter, the origin of the Universe's…
It is well known that continuous symmetries of quantum fields can be realized non-linearly, e.g. in the context of sigma models, and can also be spontaneously broken on non-compact spacetimes. In this note we study how these effects are…
In this Letter we study interacting systems with spontaneous discrete symmetry breaking, where the degenerate symmetry-broken states are topologically distinct gapped phases. Edge modes appear at domain walls between the two topological…
The Topological Hypothesis states that phase transitions should be related to changes in the topology of configuration space. The necessity of such changes has already been demonstrated. We characterize exactly the topology of the…
Symmetry breaking phase transitions play an important role in nature. When a system traverses such a transition at a finite rate, its causally disconnected regions choose the new broken symmetry state independently. Where such local choices…
Field theories predict that phase transitions sequentially breaking continuous and discrete symmetries can generate hybrid topological structures in which defects of different dimensionalities merge. We report experimental and numerical…
I briefly describe a new class of soliton configurations in field theories. These consist of topological defects which can end when they intersect other defects of equal or higher dimensionality. Such configurations may be termed…
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…
We investigate the collision of a new class of topological defects that tends to become compact as a control parameter increases to larger and larger values These new compactlike defects have, in general, more than one internal discrete…
Topological/perfectly-transmissive defects play a fundamental role in the analysis of the symmetries of two dimensional conformal field theories (CFTs). In the present work, spin chain regularizations for these defects are proposed and…
We demonstrate that field theories involving explicit breaking of continous symmetries, incorporate two generic classes of topological defects each of which is stable for a particular range of parameters. The first class includes defects of…