Related papers: Cosmic Strings and Weak Gravitational Lensing
Cosmic strings are predicted in various extensions of the Standard Model, including grand unified theories. Depending on the symmetry-breaking pattern, they can be either topologically stable or metastable. Intriguingly, metastable strings…
Gravitational lensing by large-scale structure induces weak coherent alignments in the shapes of background galaxies. Here we present evidence for the detection of this `cosmic shear' at the 3.4 sigma significance level with the William…
We study the prospects of detecting continuous gravitational waves (CGWs) from spinning neutron stars (NSs), gravitationally lensed by the galactic supermassive black hole. Assuming various astrophysically motivated spatial distributions of…
We study the correlation between the locations of galaxy-galaxy strong lensing candidates and tracers of large-scale structure from both weak lensing or X-ray emission. The COSMOS survey is a unique data set, combining deep, high resolution…
I present a class of objects called gravitational strings (GS) for their similarity to the conventional cosmic strings: even though the former are just singularities in flat spacetime, both varieties are equally "realistic", they may play…
Pulsar timing arrays are one of the powerful tools to test the existence of cosmic strings through searching for the gravitational wave background. The amplitude of the background connects to information on cosmic strings such as the…
Gravitational lensing by massive objects along the line of sight to the source causes distortions of gravitational wave-signals; such distortions may reveal information about fundamental physics, cosmology and astrophysics. In this work, we…
The gravitational interaction of an infinitely long cosmic string with a Schwarzschild black hole is studied. We consider a straight string that is initially at a great distance and moving at some initial velocity v (0 < v < c) towards the…
Aspects of string cosmology for critical and non-critical strings are discussed emphasizing the necessity to account for the dilaton dynamics for a proper incorporation of ``large - small" duality. This drastically modifies the intuition…
We examine the effect of a wiggly cosmic string for both massless and massive particle propagation along the string axis. We show that the wave equation that governs the propagation of a scalar field in the neighborhood of a wiggly string…
Gravitational wave observations provide unique opportunities to search for cosmic strings. One of the strongest sources of gravitational waves is discontinuities of cosmic strings, called kinks, which are generated at points of…
Global cosmic strings are generically predicted in particle physics beyond the Standard Model, e.g., a post-inflationary global $U(1)$ symmetry breaking which may associate with axion-like dark matter. We demonstrate that although…
Weak gravitational lensing has several important effects on the cosmic microwave background (CMB): it changes the CMB power spectra, induces non-Gaussianities, and generates a B-mode polarization signal that is an important source of…
Analysis of string interactions indicates a weakening of gravity at the string length scale, thus avoiding black holes and their singularities.
Cosmic shear is the distortion of images of distant galaxies due to weak gravitational lensing by the large-scale structure in the Universe. Such images are coherently deformed by the tidal field of matter inhomogeneities along the line of…
We consider strings with the Nambu action as extremal surfaces in a given space-time, thus, we ignore their back reaction. Especially, we look for strings sharing one symmetry with the underlying space-time. If this is a non-null symmetry,…
We report the discovery of a cluster of galaxies via its weak gravitational lensing effect on background galaxies, the first spectroscopically confirmed cluster to be discovered through its gravitational effects rather than by its…
A long-standing problem in astrophysics is to measure the mass associated with galaxies. Gravitational lensing provides one of the cleanest ways to make this measurement. To date, the most powerful lensing probes of galactic mass have been…
Weak gravitational lensing is a promising tool for the study of the mass distribution in the Universe. Here we report some partial results that show how lensing maps can be used to differentiate between cosmological models. We pay special…
Optical weak lensing surveys have become a powerful tool for precision cosmology, but remain subject to systematic effects that can severely bias cosmological parameter estimates if not carefully removed. We discuss the possibility of…