Formation of topological and nontopological defects in the early universe

Abstract

The formation of defects in the early universe is investigated used the Kibble mechanism. The distinction between topological and nontopological defects is discussed. the probability for formation of a topological defect in a d-dimensional physical space is found to be 1 2 d . The probability for formation of nontopological configurations with given winding number n is obtained and their evolution is discussed. A simple criterion for a configuration to be regarded as a defect is given for the nontopological texture. We find the critical winding above which a texture forms to be in the interval n c ϵ [ 1 2 , 1] , which leads to a probability for formation per correlation volume in the range from 0.01 to 0.21.