Related papers: Cosmic Strings
This article, written for Scolarpedia, provides a brief introduction into the subject of cosmic strings, together with a review of their main properties, cosmological evolution and observational signatures.
The cosmic string is a useful probe of the early Universe and may give us a clue to physics at high energy scales where any artificial particle accelerators cannot reach. Although one of the most promising tools is the cosmic microwave…
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…
Cosmic strings and primordial black holes (PBHs) commonly and naturally form in many scenarios describing the early universe. Here we show that if both cosmic strings and PBHs are present, their interaction leads to a range of interesting…
We review the existence, formation and properties of cosmic strings in string theory, the wide variety of observational techniques that are being employed to detect them, and the constraints that current observations impose on string theory…
Understanding of the signatures of cosmic string networks is limited by a large uncertainty in the sizes at which cosmic string loops form. We review cosmic string network evolution, and the gravitational signatures, with emphasis on this…
Effects invoked by the passage of the cosmic string through the Earth are investigated. The cosmic string induces global oscillations of the Earth whose amplitude and acceleration both linearly depend on the string line density. For the…
The predictions of the inflationary LCDM paradigm match today's high-precision measurements of the cosmic microwave background anisotropy extremely well. The same data put tight limits on other sources of anisotropy. Cosmic strings are a…
We show that stable local cosmic strings are a generic prediction of supersymmetric models where supersymmetry is broken at scales within a few orders of magnitude of the weak scale and is fed down to the observable sector by gauge…
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 argue that the light particles in string theory obey an effective quantum mechanics modified by the inclusion of a quantum-gravitational friction term, induced by unavoidable couplings to unobserved massive string states in the…
The model of cosmic string formed from two gravitating and interacting scalar fields is considered. It is shown that the regular solutions exist at special choice of the model's parameters only.
This elementary introduction to string field theory highlights the features and the limitations of this approach to quantum gravity as it is currently understood. String field theory is a formulation of string theory as a field theory in…
Many symmetry breaking patterns in grand unified theories (GUTs) give rise to cosmic strings that eventually decay when pairs of GUT monopoles spontaneously nucleate along the string cores. These strings are known as metastable cosmic…
We investigate a static, cylindrically symmetric cosmic string on the brane without a perturbative approximation. We find there could be a (large) enhancement of the (effective) string tension when the energy density at the center of the…
The interplay between string theory and cosmology is very promising. Since string theory will yield a quantum theory of space-time and unify all forces of nature, it has the potential of addressing many of the conceptual problems of the…
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…
Gravitational and massless particle radiation of straight cosmic strings with finite thickness is studied analytically. It is found that the non-linear interaction of the radiation fields emitted by a cosmic string with the ones of the…
Axion strings are horizon-size topological defects that may be produced in the early Universe. Ultra-light axion-like particles may form strings that persist to temperatures below that of big bang nucleosynthesis. Such strings have been…
Within two specific string cosmology scenarios --differing in the way the pre- and post-big bang phases are joined-- we compute the size and spectral slope of various types of cosmologically amplified quantum fluctuations that arise in…