Comparing parametric and non-parametric velocity-dependent one-scale models for domain wall evolution

Abstract

We perform a detailed comparison between a recently proposed parameter-free velocity-dependent one-scale model and the standard parametric model for the cosmological evolution of domain wall networks. We find that the latter overestimates the damping of the wall motion due to the Hubble expansion and neglects the direct impact of wall decay on the evolution of the root-mean-square velocity of the network. We show that these effects are significant but may be absorbed into a redefinition of the momentum parameter. We also discuss the implications of these findings for cosmic strings. We compute the energy loss and momentum parameters of the standard parametric model for cosmological domain wall evolution using our {non-parametric} velocity-dependent one-scale model in the context of cosmological models having a power law evolution of the scale factor a with the cosmic time t (a ∝ tλ, 0 < λ < 1), and compare with the results obtained from numerical field theory simulations. We further provide simple linear functions which roughly approximate the dependence of the energy loss and momentum parameters on λ.