arXiv subjects

João G. F. Campos

Publications and source records attributed to João G. F. Campos.

14 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2024

On the localized and delocalized modes in kink-antikink interactions: a toy model

This study deals with a piecewise $ϕ^2$ scalar field theory in $(1+1)$ dimensions. The scalar field potential is designed with a triple-well shape, engendering kink solutions with asymmetric square-well linearized potentials. Thus, the localized and delocalized modes in this model can be obtained analytically in terms of transcendental equations. This allows us to explore kink-antikink and antikink-kink collisions with any desired number of localized and delocalized modes. We obtain new scenarios of resonance windows suppression, shedding light on the role of higher excited modes in kink scattering.

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arXiv2024

Abelian Chern-Simons vortices in the presence of magnetic impurities

This work deals with Abelian Chern-Simons vortices interacting with magnetic impurities. We compute static solutions with winding numbers zero and one. Then, we develop a numerical algorithm to simulate their collisions. Collisions between a vortex with winding number two and a magnetic impurity are also performed. All scattering results are interpreted in terms of the moduli space approximation and compared with the Abelian Maxwell-Higgs model.

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arXiv2024

Collisions between kinks with long-range tails: a simple and efficient method

We construct initial configurations for the scattering between kinks with long-range tails. For this purpose, we exploit kink solutions in the presence of Bogomol'nyi-Prasad-Sommerfield (BPS)-preserving impurities. This approach offers a highly efficient method and effortless implementation with a negligible computational cost. Our algorithm has a much smaller complexity than the usual minimization method, becoming more than a hundred times faster in some scenarios. Consequently, conducting kink-antikink simulations becomes remarkably straightforward.

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arXiv2023

Kink scattering in the presence of geometric constrictions

We investigate kink-antikink collisions in a model characterized by two scalar fields in the presence of geometric constrictions. The model includes an auxiliary function that modifies the kinematics associated with one of the two fields. An important fact is that one of the fields can be solved independently, being responsible for changing the internal structure of the second one. We performed several collisions and observed the presence of resonance windows for small values of the parameters. Furthermore, we have been able to show the alternation between the appearance of oscillating pulses, as well as the annihilation and formation of kink-antikink pairs when the geometric constriction is more pronounced. The study of kink dynamics in models with geometric constrictions is connected with issues of interest such as domain wall formation and magnetization at the manometric scale.

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arXiv2023

Kink-antikink collisions in the $ϕ^8$ model: short-range to long-range journey

We studied kink-antikink collisions in (1+1)-dimensional spacetime for all $Z_2$ symmetric $ϕ^8$ models with four degenerate minima. Such a polynomial model has only one free parameter, allowing us to conduct an exhaustive analysis. We performed detailed simulations in all three sectors of the model. We observed resonance windows from both localized and delocalized modes, as well as a sector change with the formation of additional kink-antikink pairs. Furthermore, we were able to show how collisions are modified when two quadratic minima merge into a quartic one, causing the kinks to acquire a long-range character. We demonstrated that when the tail not facing the opposing kink is long-range, incoming kinks and antikinks decay directly into radiation, as suggested in \cite{campos2021interaction}, by forming a large number of small kink-antikink pairs. Finally, we briefly discussed whether our analysis could be generalized to other polynomial models.

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arXiv2023

Fermionic spectral walls in kink collisions

We show that a spectral wall, i.e., an obstacle in the dynamics of a bosonic soliton, which arises due to the transition of a normal mode into the continuum spectrum, exists after coupling the original bosonic model to fermions. This spectral wall can be experienced if the boson or fermion field is in an excited state. Furthermore, while passing through a spectral wall, an incoming kink-fermion bound state can be separated into purely bosonic kink, which continues to move to spatial infinity and a fermionic cloud that spreads in the region before the wall.

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arXiv2022

Kink-antikink collision in the supersymmetric $ϕ^4$ model

This paper investigates a model containing $ϕ^4$ kinks interacting with fermions. The fermion back-reaction is included in the equations of motion, which affects the kink-antikink collisions. We show that the fermion field generates a force that can be either attractive or repulsive. Moreover, we investigate three different scenarios, which exhibit a wide variety of behaviors including the usual scenarios observed in the $ϕ^4$ model as well as the formation of two oscillons, reflection without contact, one-bounce resonance windows, and the creation of kink-antikink pairs. We also find evidence that the fermion field can store part of the energy responsible for the energy exchange mechanism.

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arXiv2022

Resonance mediated by fermions in kink-antikink collisions

We investigate generalizations of the $ϕ^4$ and sine-Gordon models, including interactions with Dirac Fermions. We observe new resonance phenomena by taking the fermion back-reaction into account. First, we show that the vibrational mode responsible for the resonance structure of the $ϕ^4$ model has the same frequency as the energy of the fermion excited state when the back-reaction becomes more significant. Second, we consider the sine-Gordon model with the addition of a fermion field and find that a resonant structure appears, despite the absence of a scalar vibrational mode. The vibrational frequency of the mode responsible for the exchange mechanism is again the energy of the fermion excited state. Therefore, we find a new type of resonant energy exchange mechanism which is mediated by fermions.

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arXiv2022

Interactions between topological defects in (1+1) dimensions

In this thesis, we study interactions between topological defects in two-dimensional spacetimes. These defects are called kinks. They are solutions of scalar field theories with localized energy which propagate without losing its shape. In order to understand the resonance phenomenon exhibited by those models, we built a toy model where the kink's vibrational mode turns into a quasinormal mode. This causes the suppression of resonance windows and, consequently, its fractal structure is lost. Considering a higher order polynomial as the scalar field potential, we find kinks with long-range tails, which decay as a power law. We developed a numerical method to correctly initialize this systems and applied it to a scalar field model containing kinks with long-range tails in both sides. After the collision, the kink-antikink pair is annihilated for velocities below an ultra-relativistic critical velocity without bion formation. We also investigated a collision between wobbling kinks of the double sine-Gordon model. When the kinks are already wobbling before colliding, there appears resonance windows with separation after a single bounce. On the second half of the thesis, we focused on fermion-kink interactions. We studied what happens when a fermion binds to a wobbling kink. The result is that the fermion escapes from the kink as radiation and at a constant rate. This occurs if the energy gap between the initial state and the continuum threshold is not too large. Lastly, we investigated the interaction of a fermion with a background scalar field with an impurity that preserves half of the Bogomol'nyi-Prasad-Sommerfield (BPS) property. We found an adiabatic evolution near the BPS regime, which means that the system is at a static BPS solution at every moment.

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arXiv2021

Quasinormal modes in kink excitations and kink-antikink interactions: a toy model

We study excitations and collisions of kinks in a scalar field theory where the potential has two minima with $Z_2$ symmetry. The field potential is designed to create a square well potential in the stability equation of the kink excitations. The stability equation is analogous to the Schrödinger equation, and therefore we use quantum mechanics techniques to study the system. We modify the square well potential continuously, which allows the excitation to tunnel and consequently turns the normal modes of the kink into quasinormal modes. We study the effect of this transition, leading to energy leak, on isolated kink excitations. Finally, we investigate kink-antikink collisions and the resulting scaling and fractal structure of the resonance windows considering both normal and quasinormal modes and compare the results.

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arXiv2021

Wobbling double sine-Gordon kinks

We study the collision of a kink and an antikink in the double sine-Gordon model with and without the excited vibrational mode. In the latter case, we find that there is a limited range of the parameters where the resonance windows exist, despite the existence of a vibrational mode. Still, when the vibrational mode is initially excited, its energy can turn into translational energy after the collision. This creates one-bounce as well as a rich structure of higher-bounce resonance windows that depend on the wobbling phase being in or out of phase at the collision and the wobbling amplitude being sufficiently large. When the vibrational mode is excited, the modified structure of one-bounce windows is observed in the whole range of the model's parameters, and the resonant interval with higher-bounce windows gradually increases with the wobbling amplitude. We estimated the center of the one-bounce windows using a simple analytical approximation for the wobbling evolution. The kinks' final wobbling frequency is Lorentz contracted, which is simply derived from our equations. We also report that the maximum energy density value always has a smooth behavior in the resonance windows.

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arXiv2021

Fermions on wobbling kinks: normal versus quasinormal modes

The system consisting of a fermion in the background of a wobbling kink is studied in this paper. To investigate the impact of the wobbling on the fermion-kink interaction, we employ the time-dependent perturbation theory formalism in quantum mechanics. To do so, we compute the transition probabilities between states given in terms of the Bogoliubov coefficients. We derive Fermi's golden rule for the model, which allows the transition to the continuum at a constant rate if the fermion-kink coupling constant is smaller than the wobbling frequency. Moreover, we study the system replacing the shape mode with a quasinormal mode. In this case, the transition rate to continuum decays in time due to the leakage of the mode, and the final transition probability decreases sharply for large coupling constants in a way that is analogous to Fermi's golden rule. Throughout the paper, we compare the perturbative results with numerical simulations and show that they are in good agreement.

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arXiv2020

Interaction between kinks and antikinks with double long-range tails

We explore a class of $ϕ^{4n}$ models with kink and antikink solutions that have long-range tails on both sides, specializing to the cases with $n=2$ and $n=3$. A recently developed method of an accelerating kink ansatz is used to estimate the force between the kink and the antikink. We use state-of-the-art numerical methods to initialize the system in a kink-antikink configuration with a finite initial velocity and to evolve the system according to the equations of motion. Among these methods, we propose a computationally efficient way to initialize the velocity field of the system. Interestingly, we discover that, for this class of models, $ϕ^{4n}$ with $n>1$, the kink-antikink annihilation behaves differently from the archetypal $ϕ^4$ model or even the kinks with one long-range tail because there is neither long-lived bion formation nor resonance windows and the critical velocity is ultrarelativistic.

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arXiv2020

Fermion transfer in the $ϕ^4$ model with a half-BPS preserving impurity

We study a fermion field coupled to a scalar via a Yukawa term. The scalar field is the $ϕ^4$ model with an impurity that preserves half of the BPS property. We analyze the spectrum of the defects of the model and collisions between them both close to the BPS regime and not. As the fermion binds to these defects, it may be transferred from one to the other, which we quantify via overlaps, known as Bogoliubov coefficients. BPS collisions are less likely to transfer the fermion between defects and can be adiabatic for non-relativistic velocities, especially for small coupling constants. Moreover, closer to the BPS limit only a small fraction of the fermion number is radiated away. In contrast, non-BPS collisions lead to more radiation in the fermion field and excitation of the fermion to higher bound states, and the result is more sensitive to the parameters.

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