Exciting the Domain Wall Soliton

TL;DR

This paper investigates localized bound states in domain wall kinks within the $$+1$ $ theory, analyzing their decay, formation during phase transitions, and interactions with thermal environments, revealing a consistent 20% energy excess.

Contribution

It is the first detailed study of bound state excitations in domain wall kinks, including their formation, decay, and thermal effects in a cosmological context.

Findings

Kinks have a single bound state with a slow decay rate.

Kinks formed during phase transitions carry about 20% excess energy.

The amplitude of localized excitations increases with temperature but remains below 20%.

Abstract

Many solitonic configurations in field theory have localized bound states in their spectrum of linear perturbations. This opens up the possibility of having long lived excitations of these solitons that could affect their dynamics. We start the study of these effects in the simplest configuration of a domain wall kink solution in the $\lambda \phi^4$ theory in $1+1$ dimensions. We show that this solution has a single bound state and numerically study its slow decay rate in flat space. We then investigate the amplitude of this excitation by simulating a cosmological phase transition that leads to the formation of these kinks in an expanding universe. We find that kinks get formed with a $20\%$ excess of energy with respect to their lowest energy configuration. We also explore the kink solution interacting with a thermal bath and extract the amplitude of the localized excitation as a function of temperature. We note that this amplitude increases with temperature but again the extra energy in the kink never goes over the $20\%$ level. Finally, we argue that this extra energy may have important consequences in the subsequent evolution of defects in numerical simulations.