SKYRMIONS AND SEMILOCAL STRINGS IN COSMOLOGY

It has been pointed out that cosmic string solutions can exist in gauge field theories with broken symmetry even when pi1(G/H) is trivial. The stability of such semilocal defects is not guaranteed by topology and depends on dynamical considerations. In the literature it has been tacitly assumed that if stable, such strings would from in the Early Universe in a manner analogous to the formation of a network of more robust topologically-stable strings. In this paper we find that except for unnaturally small values of the correlation length, a network of semilocal strings does not form. Instead, delocalized skyrmionic string configurations, which expand with the Hubble flow, dominate.