Defect Formation Rates in Cosmological First-Order Phase Transitions

Details Defect Formation Rates in Cosmological First-Order Phase Transitions Defect Formation Rates in Cosmological First-Order Phase Transitions

2001-02-04

arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/0102035v2

Phys.Rev. D64 (2001) 023520

Physics

High Energy Physics

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology

9 pages, 5 figures. Replaced with version to appear in Physical Review D

Scientific paper

10.1103/PhysRevD.64.023520

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 reduction in the number of topological defects formed per bubble, as a result of phase equilibration between bubbles. This claim has been verified for spontaneously-broken global symmetries. We perform a series of simulations of complete phase transitions in the 2+1-dimensional U(1)-Abelian Higgs model, for a range of bubble wall velocities, in order to obtain a quantitative measure of the effect of bubble wall speed on the number density of topological defects. We find that the number of defects formed is i) significantly lower in the local than the global case and ii) decreases exponentially as a function of wall velocity. Slow-moving bubbles also lead, however, to the nucleation of more bubbles before the phase transition is complete. Our simulations show that this is in fact the dominant effect, and so we predict {\em more} defects per unit volume as a result of the sub-luminal bubble wall terminal velocity.

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