Related papers: Super-horizon cosmic string correlations

The topic of cosmic strings provides a bridge between the physics of the very small and the very large. They are predicted by some unified theories of particle interactions. If they exist, they may help to explain some of the largest-scale…

The unique, conical spacetime created by cosmic strings brings about distinctive gravitational lensing phenomena. The variety of these distinctive phenomena is increased when the strings have non-trivial mutual interactions. In particular,…

We provide a thorough exposition of recent results on the quantum stabilization of cosmic strings. Stabilization occurs through the coupling to a heavy fermion doublet in a reduced version of the standard model. The study combines the…

We consider a local cosmic string described by the Abelian-Higgs model in the framework of scalar-tensor gravities. We find the metric of the cosmic string in the weak-field approximation. The propagation of particles and light is analysed…

Superconductors are the only experimentally accessible systems with spontaneously broken gauge symmetries which support topologically nontrivial defects, namely string defects. We propose two experiments whose aim is the observation of the…

Cosmic superstrings are expected to be formed at the end of brane inflation, within the context of brane-world cosmological models inspired from string theory. By studying properties of cosmic suprestring networks, and comparing their…

We show that adiabatic, super-Hubble, and almost scale invariant density fluctuations are produced by cosmic strings in a contracting universe. An essential point is that isocurvature perturbations produced by topological defects such as…

In the light of $\phi$-mapping topological current theory, the structure of cosmic strings are obtained from the Abelian Higgs model, which is an effective description to the brane world cosmic string system. In this topological description…

Cosmic strings, a hot subject in the 1980's and early 1990's, lost its appeal when it was found that it leads to inconsistencies in the power spectrum of the measured cosmic microwave background temperature anisotropies. However,…

We consider the cosmological consequences of a network of superconducting cosmic strings. For strong enough current the period of friction domination never ends. Instead a plasma scaling solution is reached. We demonstrate that this gives…

Cosmic (super)strings offer promising ways to test ideas about the early universe and physics at high energies. While in field theory constructions their tension is usually assumed to be constant (or at most slowly-varying), this is often…

We re-visit the production of cosmic rays by cusps on cosmic strings. If a scalar field (``Higgs'') has a linear interaction with the string world-sheet, such as would occur if there is a bosonic condensate on the string, cusps on string…

Cosmic strings provide a radically different paradigm for the formation of structure to the prevailing inflationary one. They afford some extra technical complications: for example, the calculation of the power spectrum of matter and…

We present results from the first simulations of networks of Type I Abelian Higgs cosmic strings to include both matter and radiation eras and Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) constraints. In Type I strings, the string tension is a slowly…

Cosmic strings can arise in hidden sector models with a spontaneously broken Abelian symmetry group. We have studied the couplings of the Standard Model fields to these so-called dark strings in the companion paper. Here we survey the…

It has been pointed out that cosmic string solutions can exist in gauge field theories with broken symmetry even when $\pi _1(G/H)$ is trivial. The stability of such semilocal defects is not guaranteed by topology and depends on dynamical…

We study the behaviour and consequences of cosmic string networks in contracting universes. They approximately behave during the collapse phase as a radiation fluids. Scaling solutions describing this are derived and tested against…

Cosmic strings in non-abelian gauge theories naturally gain a spectrum of massless, or light, excitations arising from their embedding in color and flavor space. This opens up the possibility that colliding strings miss each other in the…

Thermal inflation was proposed as a mechanism to dilute the density of cosmological moduli. Thermal inflation is driven by a complex scalar field possessing a large vacuum expectation value and a very flat potential, called a `flaton'. Such…

We present a detailed analysis of {\it excited} cosmic string solutions which possess superconducting currents. These currents can be excited inside the string core, and - if the condensate is large enough - can lead to the excitations of…