ANALYTIC SCALING SOLUTIONS FOR COSMIC DOMAIN-WALLS

A relativistic generalization of a well-known method for approximating the dynamics of topological defects in condensed matter is constructe d, and applied to the evolution of domain walls in a cosmological cont ext. It is shown that there are self-similar ''scaling'' solutions, fo r which one can, in principle, calculate many quantities of interest w ithout recourse to numerical simulations. Here, the area density in th e scaling regime is calculated in various backgrounds. Remarkably good agreement with numerical simulations is obtained.