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Title: Frustrated expectations: Defect networks and dark energy

Journal Article · · Physical Review. D, Particles Fields
;  [1];  [1];  [1];  [1]
  1. Centro de Fisica do Porto, Rua do Campo Alegre 687, 4169-007 Porto (Portugal)

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.

OSTI ID:
20774871
Journal Information:
Physical Review. D, Particles Fields, Vol. 73, Issue 12; Other Information: DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevD.73.123519; (c) 2006 The American Physical Society; Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 0556-2821
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English

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