2019/02/14 by Tomasz Krajewski, Zygmunt Lalak, Marek Lewicki +1 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Dark Matter and Cosmic Phenomena #Domain (mathematical analysis) #Geometry #Higgs boson #Higgs field #Inflation (cosmology) #Inverse #Lattice (music) #Observable #Particle physics #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies #Physics #Quantum mechanics #Theoretical physics #Thermal #Thermodynamics #astro-ph.CO #gr-qc #hep-ph #hep-th
paper · pdf · doi:10.1016/j.dark.2019.100347
published in Physics of the Dark Universe 26, 100347 (Elsevier BV)
arxiv created 2019/02/14 · openalex publication_date 2019/07/01 · arxiv updated 2022/06/10 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
Most cosmological models predict that the universe was hot and dense at the early stages of it's evolution. In this paper we analyse the influence of the thermal bath of Standard Model particles on the dynamics of cosmological Higgs domain walls. This manuscript poses an~extension of our earlier work in which we investigated the evolution of networks of Higgs domain walls neglecting the impact of temperature variation. Using the thermally corrected effective potential of Standard Model we have found that both the position of the local maximum hmax separating minima and the width of domain walls strongly depend on temperature T. For temperatures higher than 1010 \textrmGeV they respectively increase proportionally and decrease inverse proportionally to the increasing temperature. Thus, the energy scale of the problem follows the value of temperature. Our numerical lattice simulations based on the PRS algorithm reveal that Higgs domain walls in the presence of the background thermal bath are highly unstable and decay shortly after formation. Moreover we have found that the fraction of horizons produced by inflation in which Higgs field expectation value is higher then hmax needs to be very low in order for the evolution of the~network of the domain walls to end in the electroweak vacuum. This means that Higgs domain walls necessarily were very rare objects and their average energy density was very small. As a result, the domain walls can not significantly effect cosmological observables.