Simulation of Vortex-Antivortex Pair Production in a Phase Transition with Explicit Symettry Breaking

Abstract

We carry out numerical simulation of the formation of U(1) global vortices in a first order phase transition in 2+1 dimensions in the presence of small explicit symmetry breaking. Bubbles of broken symmetry phase are randomly nucleated, which grow and coalesce. Vortices form at junctions of bubbles via standard Kibble mechanism as well as due to a new mechanism, recently proposed by us, where defect-antidefect pairs are produced due to field oscillations. In a simulation involving nucleation of 63 bubbles, with bias in phase distribution inside bubbles arising from explicit symmetry breaking, we find that not a single vortex/antivortex is produced via the Kibble mechanism, while the new mechanism leads to production of 104 vortices and antivortices. Even without biasing the phase distribution inside bubbles, the vortex production is completely dominated by this new mechanism, which accounts for the production of about 80% of the vortices and antivortices, remaining 20% being produced via the Kibble mechanism. We study the dependence of the effectiveness of the new mechanism on the magnitude of explicit symmetry breaking, as well as on the nucleation rate of bubbles. We also study the effect of damping on this mechanism and show that damping suppresses this mode of vortex production.