Related papers: Observational constraints on light cosmic strings …
We calculate the deflection of a light ray caused by the gravitational field of a cosmic string loop in the weak field limit and reduce the problem to a single quadrature over a time slice of the loop's world sheet. We then apply this…
Constraints on the potential properties of superconducting cosmic strings provide an indirect probe of physics beyond the standard model at energies inaccessible to terrestrial particle colliders. In this study, we perform the first joint…
We study the problem of searching for cosmic string signal patterns in the present high resolution and high sensitivity observations of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). This article discusses a technique capable of recognizing…
We study the effect of weak lensing by cosmic (super-)strings on the anisotropies of cosmic microwave background (CMB). In developing a method to calculate the lensing convergence field due to strings, and thereby temperature 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…
Measurements of radio emission from distant galaxies and quasars verify that the polarization vectors of these radiations are not randomly oriented as naturally expected. This peculiar phenomenon suggests that the spacetime intervening…
Extending the Kaiser-Stebbins mechanism we propose here a method for detecting relics of topological defects such as cosmic strings based on lens-induced small-scale B-type polarization in the CMB. Models of inflation, in which large scale…
The gravitational lensing by long, wiggly cosmic strings is shown to produce a large number of lensed images of a background source. In addition to pairs of images on either side of the string, a number of small images outline the string…
The lensing properties of superconducting cosmic strings endowed with a time dependent pulse of lightlike current are investigated. The metric outside the core of the string belongs to the $pp$--wave class, with a deficit angle. We study…
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…
We report on the first results from a large-scale observing campaign aiming to use astrometric microlensing to detect and place limits on the mass of single objects, including stellar remnants. We used the Hubble Space Telescope to monitor…
We study the observational signature of vector metric perturbations through the effect of weak gravitational lensing. In the presence of vector perturbations, the non-vanishing signals for B-mode cosmic shear and curl-mode deflection angle,…
The possibility to detect cosmic strings -- topological defects of early Universe, by means of wave effects in gravitational lensing is discussed. To find the optimal observation conditions, we define the hyperbolic-shaped Fresnel…
We explore the use of random forest and gradient boosting, two powerful tree-based machine learning algorithms, for the detection of cosmic strings in maps of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), through their unique Gott-Kaiser-Stebbins…
We use wavelet and curvelet transforms to extract signals of cosmic strings from cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature anisotropy maps, and to study the limits on the cosmic string tension which various ongoing CMB temperature…
We describe the detailed study and results of high-resolution numerical simulations of string-induced structure formation in open universes and those with a non-zero cosmological constant. The effect from small loops generated from the…
Cosmic strings were postulated by Kibble in 1976 and, from a theoretical point of view, their existence finds support in modern superstring theories, both in compactification models and in theories with extended additional dimensions. Their…
We investigate properties of Galactic microlensing events in which a stellar object is lensed by a neutron star. For an all-sky photometric microlensing survey, we determine the number of lensing events caused by $\sim10^{5}$…
In an analysis of the gravitational lensing by two relativistic cosmic strings, we argue that the formation of closed time-like curves proposed by Gott is unstable in the presence of particles (e.g. the cosmic microwave background…
We find the constraints from WMAP and SDSS data on the fraction of cosmological fluctuations sourced by local cosmic strings using a Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) analysis. In addition to varying the usual 6 cosmological parameters and…