相关论文: Formation of Topological Defects in a Second Order…

We analyse the evolution of scalar and gauge fields during a second order phase transition using a Langevin equation approach. We show that topological defects formed during the phase transition are stable to thermal fluctuations. Our…

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…

The nature of the Abelian Higgs Model phase transition is investigated. A variational approximation is used in the evaluation of the relevant finite temperature effective potential. Some of the results presented are valid not only in the…

In superconductors, and in other systems with a local U(1) gauge invariance, there are two mechanisms that form topological defects in phase transitions. In addition to the standard Kibble mechanism, thermal fluctuations of the magnetic…

We present a mechanism in which models with two Higgs fields can undergo a two stage phase transition as the temperature falls. The first stage is a conventional second order (or weakly first order) transition in which the symmetry is…

We show by studying the Abelian Higgs model with numerical lattice simulations that non-thermal phase transitions arising out of preheating after inflation are possible in gauge-Higgs models under rather general circumstances. This may lead…

The formation of topological defects in a second order phase transition in the early universe is an out-of-equilibrium process. Condensed matter experiments seem to support Zurek's mechanism, in which the freezing of thermal fluctuations…

We study non--equilibrium ensemble corrections to particle masses and the effective potential in the early universe, using a uniform momentum distribution as an example. The resulting thermalization temperature is computed assuming \sm…

A natural question about Quantum Field Theory is whether there is a deformation to a trivial gapped phase. If the underlying theory has an anomaly, then symmetric deformations can never lead to a trivial phase. We discuss such discrete…

The time evolution of soft modes in a quantum gauge field theory is to first approximation classical, but the equations of motion are non-local. We show how they can be written in a local and Hamiltonian way in an Abelian theory, and that…

Topological defects can have significant cosmological consequences, so their production must be examined carefully. It is usually assumed that topological defects are produced if the temperature becomes sufficiently high, but in reality…

The formation probability of multiple winding topological defects is calculated by phase and flux distribution analysis based on the Kibble mechanism. The core size of defects is taken into account so that when it is much larger than the…

The Ginzburg temperature has historically been proposed as the energy scale of formation of topological defects at a second order symmetry breaking phase transition. More recently alternative proposals which compute the time of formation of…

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…

The real-time dynamics of topological defects and turbulent configurations of gauge fields for electric and magnetic confinement are studied numerically within a 2+1D Abelian Higgs model. It is shown that confinement is appearing in such…

In these Lectures a method is described to analyze the effect of quantum fluctuations on topological defect backgrounds up to the one-loop level. The method is based on the spectral heat kernel/zeta function regularization procedure, and it…

We explore the low-temperature behavior of the Abelian Higgs model in AdS_4, away from the probe limit in which back-reaction of matter fields on the metric can be neglected. Over a significant range of charges for the complex scalar, we…

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…

In the ``Type-II'' regime, $m_{\rm Higgs}\gap m_{\rm gauge}$, the finite-temperature phase transition in spontaneously-broken gauge theories (including the standard model) must be be studied using a renormalization group treatment. Previous…

While the finite-temperature effective potential in a gauge theory is a gauge-dependent quantity, in several instances a first-order phase transition can be triggered by gauge-independent terms. A particularly interesting case occurs when…