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Phys. Rev. D 69, 043513 (2004) [7 pages]

Formation of domain wall lattices

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Nuno D. Antunes
Center for Theoretical Physics, University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton BN1 9WJ, United Kingdom

Levon Pogosian
Theoretical Physics, The Blackett Laboratory, Imperial College, Prince Consort Road, London SW7 2BZ, United Kingdom

Tanmay Vachaspati
CERCA, Department of Physics, Case Western Reserve University, 10900 Euclid Avenue, Cleveland, Ohio 44106-7079, USA

Received 29 July 2003; published 27 February 2004

We study the formation of domain walls in a phase transition in which an S5×Z2 symmetry is spontaneously broken to S3×S2. In one compact spatial dimension we observe the formation of a stable domain wall lattice. In two spatial dimensions we find that the walls form a network with junctions, there being six walls to every junction. The network of domain walls evolves so that junctions annihilate antijunctions. The final state of the evolution depends on the relative dimensions of the simulation domain. In particular we never observe the formation of a stable lattice of domain walls for the case of a square domain but we do observe a lattice if one dimension is somewhat smaller than the other. During the evolution, the total wall length in the network decays with time as t-0.71, as opposed to the usual t-1 scaling typical of regular Z2 networks.

© 2004 The American Physical Society

URL:
http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevD.69.043513
DOI:
10.1103/PhysRevD.69.043513
PACS:
98.80.Cq, 05.70.Fh, 11.27.+d