Stretching and Kibble scaling regimes for Hubble-damped defect networks

Martins, C.J.A.P.; Rybak, I. Yu.; Avgoustidis, A.; Shellard, E.P.S.

Abstract

The cosmological evolution of topological defect networks can broadly be divided into two stages. At early times they are friction dominated due to particle scattering and therefore nonrelativistic and may either be conformally stretched or evolve in the Kibble regime. At late times they are relativistic and evolve in the well-known linear scaling regime. In this work we show that a sufficiently large Hubble damping (that is a sufficiently fast expansion rate) leads to a linear scaling regime where the network is nonrelativistic. This is therefore another realization of a Kibble scaling regime and also has a conformal stretching regime counterpart which we characterize for the first time. We describe these regimes using analytic arguments in the context of the velocity-dependent one-scale model, and we confirm them using high-resolution 4096[superscript]3 field-theory simulations of domain wall networks. We also use these simulations to improve the calibration of this analytic model for the case of domain walls.

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Dec 9, 2016
• Online Publication Date: Dec 27, 2016
• Publication Date: Dec 27, 2016
• Deposit Date: Apr 24, 2017
• Publicly Available Date: Apr 24, 2017
• Journal: Physical Review D
• Print ISSN: 2470-0010
• Electronic ISSN: 2470-0029
• Publisher: American Physical Society
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 94
• Issue: 11
• Article Number: 116017
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.94.116017
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/832073
• Publisher URL: https://journals.aps.org/prd/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevD.94.116017
• Additional Information: Erratum: Phys. Rev.D95,no.3,039902(2017); (Not an erratum: publisher had published in the wrong section of the journal, then made an editorial note/erratum in the correct section at a later date (21/02/17) stating: "This paper was inadvertently published online on 27 December 2016 in the wrong issue of the journal (Issue 11: D1 instead of Issue 12: D15). This Note is being published in Issue 4 to call the article to the attention of interested readers. We regret the error.")