Seminarium "Teoria cząstek elementarnych i kosmologia"

I will show that dynamics of vortices (strings) is extremely sensitive to (1) existence of internal modes and (2) existence of a false point-like vacuum. The excitation of the modes is responsible for a complete breakdown of the geodesic dynamics  leading e.g., to chaotic, fractal-like pattern in scatterings of local vortices. The false vacuum radically changes the global vortex-antivortex annihilation. Specifically, despite the flat direction, it leads to appearance of very long-lived oscillons. This may change the abundance of axions if higher order operators are included.