Clustering of cosmological defects at the time of formation

A simple model for the formation of global monopoles is considered. It is shown that they naturally form in clusters, with monopoles adjacent to antimonopoles, and vice-versa. The strong attraction between pole and antipole causes the clusters to collapse very rapidly, leading to the annihilation of most (62% in our model) of the original defects within a time τ, where τ is of the order of the correlation length. (orig.)