Related papers: Probing Particle Physics from Top Down with Cosmic…
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 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…
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 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…
New physics beyond the Standard Model can give rise to stochastic gravitational-wave backgrounds, for example through cosmic strings. In this way, gravitational-wave searches with pulsar-timing arrays as well as existing and future laser…
Cosmic strings are generic cosmological predictions of many extensions of the Standard Model of particle physics, such as a $U(1)^\prime$ symmetry breaking phase transition in the early universe or remnants of superstring theory. Unlike…
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,…
It is now widely acknowledged that cosmic rays experiments can test possible new physics directly generated at the Planck scale or at some other fundamental scale. By studying particle properties at energies far beyond the reach of any…
Cosmic strings are generically predicted in many extensions of the Standard Model of particle physics. We propose a new avenue for detecting cosmic strings through their effect on the filamentary structure in the cosmic web. Using…
Cosmic strings are linear concentrations of energy that form whenever phase transitions in the early universe break axial symmetries as originally shown by Kibble. They are the result of frustrated order in the quantum fields responsible…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Predicting signatures of string theory on cosmological observables is not sufficient. Often the observable effects string theory may impact upon the cosmological arena may equally be predicted by features of inflationary physics. The…
The topological defect scenario of origin of the observed highest energy cosmic rays is reviewed. Under a variety of circumstances, topological defects formed in the early Universe can be sources of very massive particles in the Universe…
At its very beginning, the universe is believed to have grown exponentially in size via the mechanism of inflation. The almost scale-invariant density perturbation spectrum predicted by inflation is strongly supported by cosmological…
We review the current observational status of string cosmology when confronted with experimental datasets. We begin by defining common observational parameters and discuss how they are determined for a given model. Then we review the…
We propose a new method for identifying new physics imprints on present observational data in cosmology whereby signatures of string theory are clearly distinguished from imprints of possible features on the inflaton potential. Our method…