We consider the formation of domain walls in the early Universe. Our models consist of spacetimes which are initially either Minkowski or de Sitter space and which evolve into the type-I or -II domain-wall spacetimes of Ipser and Sikivie. The geometrical matching between these spacetimes is done explicitly and the structure of the resulting spacetime is studied. Finally, we consider quantum field theory in these spacetimes. We study the effects of particle production and vacuum polarization which result from the formation and existence of type-I domain walls by computing the energy density of a quantized scalar field. We find that these effects are important only for walls with Planckian surface tension such as those that occur in some superstring models.

• Received 28 September 1989

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.41.3604