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Abstract:

From an observational perspective cosmology is today in excellent shape - advances in instrumentation and data processing have enabled us to study the universe in detail back to when the first galaxies formed, map the fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background which provide a measure of the overall geometry, and reconstruct the thermal history reliably back to at least the primordial nucleosynthesis era. However recent deep studies of the Hubble expansion rate have suggested that the universe is accelerating, driven by some form of `dark' (vacuum) energy. If true, this implies a new energy scale in Nature of order 0.001 eV, well below any known scale of fundamental physics. This has refocussed attention on the notorious cosmological constant problem at the interface of general relativity and quantum field theory. It is possible that the resolution of this situation will require fundamental modifications to our ideas about gravity.

Abstract:

After inflation occurs, a weakly coupled scalar field will in general not be in thermal equilibrium but have a distribution of values determined by the inflationary Hubble parameter. If such a field subsequently undergoes discrete symmetry breaking, then the different degenerate vacua may not be equally populated so the domain walls which form will be "biased" and the wall network will subsequently collapse. Thus the cosmological domain wall problem may be solved for sufficiently weakly coupled fields in a post inflationary universe. We quantify the criteria for determining whether this does happen, using a Higgs-like potential, with a spontaneously broken Z2 symmetry. © 2001 The American Physical Society.