Related papers: Cosmic Strings
Cosmic strings are linear concentrations of energy that may be formed at phase transitions in the very early universe. At one time they were thought to provide a possible origin for the density inhomogeneities from which galaxies eventually…
Cosmic strings are predicted by many field-theory models, and may have been formed at a symmetry-breaking transition early in the history of the universe, such as that associated with grand unification. They could have important…
Cosmic strings are one-dimensional topological defects which could have been formed in the early stages of our Universe. They triggered a lot of interest, mainly for their cosmological implications: they could offer an alternative to…
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…
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,…
Cosmic strings are topological defects possibly formed in the early Universe, which may be observable due to their gravitational effects on the cosmic microwave background radiation or gravitational wave experiments. To this effect it is…
Cosmic strings are topological defects which can be formed as a result of phase transitions with a spontaneous symmetry breaking in the early Universe. The possibility of the generation of a magnetic field around a cosmic string on the…
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…
Cosmic strings are predicted in many models beyond the Standard Model of particle physics. In models which admit strings, a network of strings will inevitably be formed in a phase transition in the early universe and will persist to the…
Cosmic strings are stable topological defects that may have been created at a phase transition in the early universe. It is a growing belief that, for a wide range of theoretical models, such strings may be superconducting and carry…
The cosmic string theory for cosmological fluctuations is a good example of healthy scientific progress in cosmology. It is a well defined physically motivated model that has been tested by cosmological observations and has been ruled out…
The properties of cosmic strings have been investigated in detail for their implications in early-universe cosmology. Although many variations of the basic structure have been discovered, with implications for both the microscopic and…
Flat directions are a generic feature of the scalar potential in supersymmetric gauge field theories. They can arise, for example, from D-terms associated with an extra abelian gauge symmetry. Even when supersymmetry is broken softly, there…
Making use of the wealth of new observational data coming from the sky it is possible to constrain particle physics theories beyond the Standard Model. One way to do this is illustrated in this article: a subset of theories admits cosmic…
Cosmic superstrings are produced at the end of brane inflation. Their properties are similar to cosmic strings arising in grand unified theories. Like cosmic strings they can give rise to a primordial magnetic field, as a result of vortical…
String cosmology aims at providing a reliable description of the very early Universe in the regime where standard-model physics is no longer appropriate, and where we can safely apply the basic ingredients of superstring models such as…
We argue that cosmic strings with high winding numbers generally form in first-order gauge symmetry breaking phase transitions, and we demonstrate this using computer simulations. These strings are heavier than single-winding strings and…
${\rm B - L}$ cosmic strings form in a wide class of theories beyond the Standard Model which contain a ${\rm U}(1)_{{\rm B - L}}$ gauge symmetry. They can form at the end of hybrid inflation and explain, together with inflation, the Cosmic…
Whilst standard field theoretic Cosmic Strings cannot end, Cosmic Superstrings can form three string junctions, at which each string ends. This opens up a new class of possible boundary conditions for such strings and we show that, at least…
Large-scale magnetic fields are observed today to be coherent on galactic scales. While there exists an explanation for their amplification and their specific configuration in spiral galaxies -- the dynamo mechanism -- a satisfying…