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Cosmic strings formed during inflation are expected to be either diluted over super-Hubble distances, i.e., invisible today, or to have crossed our past light cone very recently. We discuss the latter situation in which a few strings…
When moduli roll in the early universe, all physical scales - including string tensions - simultaneously evolve. The dynamics of cosmic string loops with time-varying tension can produce cosmic string loop trackers in which most of 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…
Searches for primordial gravitational waves have resulted in constraints in a large frequency range from a variety of sources. The standard Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) technique is to parameterise the tensor power spectrum in terms of…
We examine the spectrum of gravitational radiation emitted by a network of cosmic strings, with emphasis on the observational constraints and the opportunities for detection. The analysis improves over past work, as we use a…
Cosmic microwave background (CMB) constraints on dark matter annihilation are a uniquely powerful tool in the quest to understand the nature of dark matter. Annihilation of dark matter to Standard Model particles between recombination and…
The recent observation that the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) may prefer a neutrino excess has triggered a number of works studying this possibility. The effect obtained by the non-interacting massless neutrino excess could be mimicked…
We study axion strings of hyperlight axions coupled to photons. Hyperlight axions -- axions lighter than Hubble at recombination -- are a generic prediction of the string axiverse. These axions strings produce a distinct quantized…
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…
Measurements of the polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation are expected to significantly increase our understanding of the early universe. We present a design for a CMB polarimeter in which a cryogenically cooled…
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…
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 present the first CMB power spectra from numerical simulations of the global O(N) linear $\sigma$-model with N = 2,3, which have global strings and monopoles as topological defects. In order to compute the CMB power spectra we compute…
We investigate the constraints that can be placed on the cosmic string tension by using the current Pulsar Timing Array limits on the stochastic gravitational wave background (SGWB). We have developed a code to compute the spectrum of…
We explore the cosmological consequences of the superconductivity of QCD axion strings. Axion strings can support a sizeable chiral electric current and charge, which alters their early universe dynamics. Shrinking axion string loops can…
A possible signature of a class of superconducting cosmic strings trapped in the Milky Way plasma is the emission of low energy antiprotons due to baryon number violating processes on the string. We find the terrestrial flux and the energy…
We explore the impact of the reionization history on examining the shape of the power spectrum of the primordial gravitational waves (PGWs) with the cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarization. The large-scale CMB generated from the…
Spectroscopic studies of high-redshift objects and increasingly precise data on the cosmic microwave background (CMB) are beginning to independently place strong complementary bounds on the epoch of hydrogen reionization. Parameter…
We place new constraints on sources of ionizing and resonance radiation at the epoch of the recombination process using the recent CMB temperature and polarization spectra coming from WMAP. We find that non-standard recombination scenarios…
We discuss the possible impact of astrophysical foregrounds on three recent exciting results of Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) experiments: the WMAP measurements of the temperature-polarization (TE) correlation power spectrum, the…