Stretching and Kibble scaling regimes for Hubble-damped defect networks

Understand

The cosmological evolution of topological defect networks can broadly be divided into two stages.

• At early times they are friction-dominated due to particle scattering and therefore non-relativistic, and may either be conformally stretched or evolve in the Kibble regime.
• At late times they are relativistic and evolve in the well known linear scaling regime.
• In this work we show that a sufficiently large Hubble damping (that is a sufficiently fast expansion rate) leads to a linear scaling regime where the network is non-relativistic.