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Phys. Rev. D 73, 123519 (2006) [9 pages]

Frustrated expectations: Defect networks and dark energy

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P. P. Avelino1,2,*, C. J. A. P. Martins1,3,†, J. Menezes1,‡, R. Menezes1,4,§, and J. C. R. E. Oliveira1,2,**
1Centro de Física do Porto, Rua do Campo Alegre 687, 4169-007 Porto, Portugal
2Departamento de Física da Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade do Porto, Rua do Campo Alegre 687, 4169-007 Porto, Portugal
3Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, Centre for Mathematical Sciences, University of Cambridge, Wilberforce Road, Cambridge CB3 0WA, United Kingdom
4Departamento de Física, Universidade Federal da Paraíba, Caixa Postal 5008, 58051-970 João Pessoa, Paraíba, Brazil

Received 27 February 2006; published 15 June 2006

We discuss necessary conditions for a network of cosmic domain walls to have a chance of providing the dark energy that might explain the recent acceleration of the Universe. We derive a strong bound on the curvature of the walls, which shows that viable candidate networks must be fine-tuned and nonstandard. We also discuss various requirements that any stable lattice of frustrated walls must obey. We conjecture that, even though one can build (by hand) lattices that would be stable, no such lattices will ever come out of realistic domain wall forming cosmological phase transitions. We provide some simple numerical simulations that illustrate our results and correct some misconceptions in the published literature, but a detailed numerical analysis is left for a companion paper.

© 2006 The American Physical Society

URL:
http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevD.73.123519
DOI:
10.1103/PhysRevD.73.123519
PACS:
98.80.Cq, 11.27.+d, 98.80.Es

*Electronic address: ppavelin@fc.up.pt

Electronic address: C.J.A.P.Martins@damtp.cam.ac.uk

Electronic address: jmenezes@fc.up.pt

§Electronic address: rms@fisica.ufpb.br

**Electronic address: jeolivei@fc.up.pt