Cosmological Strucure Formation with Topological Defects

TL;DR

This paper evaluates topological defect models for cosmological structure formation, highlighting their disagreements with recent CMB observations and challenging the decoherence assumption inherent in such models.

Contribution

It provides a comparative analysis of defect-based models against observational data, emphasizing their incompatibility with current CMB anisotropy measurements.

Findings

Defect models are inconsistent with recent CMB data.

Decoherence is not supported by current observations.

Inflationary models remain more compatible with data.

Abstract

Structure formation with topological defects is described. The main differences from inflationary models are highlighted. The results are compared with recent observations. It is concluded that all the defect models studied so far are in disagreement with recent observations of CMB anisotropies. Furthermore, present observations do not support 'decoherence', a generic feature of structure formation from topological defects.