Cosmic structure formation with topological defects

By R. Durrer, Martin Kunz, A. Melchiorri. 2001

136 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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 lines in liquid crystals. In an adiabatically expanding universe which cools down from a very hot initial state, it is quite natural to postulate that topological defects may have emerged during a phase transition in the early universe and that they may have played the role of initial inhomogeneities seeding the formation of cosmic structure. This basic idea goes back to Kibble (1976). In this report we summarize the progress made in the investigation of Kibble's idea during the last 25 years. Our understanding of the formation and evolution of topological defects is reported almost completely in the beautiful book by Vilenkin & Shellard or the excellent Review by Hindmarsh & Kibble, and we shall hence be rather short on that topic. Nevertheless, in order to be self contained, we have included a short chapter on spontaneous symmetry breaking and defect formation. Our main topic is however the calculation of structure formation with defects, results which are not included in the above references.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3ff80cad4cbe90864276cf3018444af4c34a7866

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Citations in the corpus

First-Year Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) Observations: Implications For Inflation (2003, methodology): “The causal scaling seed model shown is a flat Family I model in the classification of Durrer et al. (2002) that provided a good fit to the pre-WMAP temperature data.”
Spontaneous skyrmion ground states in magnetic metals (2006, background): “Skyrmions are a characteristic of non-linear continuum models ranging from microscopic to cosmological scales [3, 4, 5, 6].”
Cosmological Magnetic Fields: Their Generation, Evolution and Observation (2013, methodology): “A case quite similar to scaling topological defects, see Durrer et al (2002).”
Inflation and String Theory (2014, background): “5 In contrived scenarios, causal evolution inside the horizon yields isocurvature perturbations that lead to acoustic peaks [106] — see the review [107].”
Exploring cosmic origins with CORE: Inflation (2016, methodology): “A general method for calculating CMB power spectra from defects starts with the numerical solution of the classical field theory in an expanding background, from which the unequal time correlators (UETCs) of the energy-momentum tensor are extracted [332, 333].”