Long-Lived Time-Dependent Remnants During Cosmological Symmetry
  Breaking: From Inflation to the Electroweak Scale
  Through a detailed numerical investigation in three spatial dimensions, we
demonstrate that long-lived time-dependent field configurations emerge
dynamically during symmetry breaking in an expanding de Sitter spacetime. We
investigate two situations: a single scalar field with a double-well potential
and the bosonic sector of an SU(2) non-Abelian Higgs model. For the single
scalar, we show that large-amplitude oscillon configurations emerge
spontaneously and persist to contribute about 1.2% of the energy density of the
universe. We also show that for a range of parameters, oscillon lifetimes are
enhanced by the expansion and that this effect is a result of parametric
resonance. For the SU(2) case, we see about 4% of the final energy density in
oscillons.
