Related papers: Percolating Cosmic String loops from evaporating p…
Large-scale coherent magnetic fields are observed in galaxies and clusters, but their ultimate origin remains a mystery. We reconsider the prospects for primordial magnetogenesis by a cosmic string network. We show that the magnetic flux…
The amount of the Hawking radiation in Hartle-Hawking vacuum around the Schwarzschild black hole is calculated in the presence of the cloud of virtual-cosmic-string loops near the black hole. Recently, Coleman, Preskill and Wilczek have…
Black holes, the simplest solution to Einstein's field equations, do not emit light, making their observations a major challenge for researchers. However, discovery of binary black holes (BBHs) in 2015 by LIGO has transformed the study of…
We investigate how Hawking radiation from low-mass primordial black holes deposits energy into the early-universe plasma and show that the resulting phenomena are hydrodynamic rather than purely diffusive. Combining analytic arguments with…
When cosmic strings are formed during inflation, they regrow to reach a scaling regime, leaving distinct imprints on the stochastic gravitational wave background (SGWB). Such signatures, associated with specific primordial features, can be…
After the end of inflation, the inflaton field oscillates around a local minimum of its potential and decays into ordinary matter. These oscillations trigger a resonant instability for cosmological perturbations with wavelengths that exit…
Susskind has recently shown that a relativistic string approaching the event horizon of a black hole spreads in both the transverse and longitudinal directions in the reference frame of an outside observer. The transverse spreading can be…
In these lectures I discuss the possibility that superstrings of cosmic length might exist and be observable. I first review the original idea of cosmic strings arising as gauge theory solitons, and discuss in particular their network…
Primordial black holes (PBHs) generated by gravitational collapse of large primordial overdensities can be a fraction of the observed dark matter. In this paper, we introduce a mechanism to produce a large peak in the primordial power…
Primordial black holes (PBHs) could account for all or part of dark matter, as well as for some LIGO events. We discuss the spins of primordial black holes produced in different cosmological scenarios, with the emphasis on recently…
Supercooled phase transitions, as predicted, e.g., in near-conformal and confining extensions of the Standard Model (SM), are established sources of strong stochastic gravitational wave backgrounds (SGWBs). In this work, we investigate…
Primordial Black Holes (PBHs) can form in the radiation dominated early Universe from the collapse of large density perturbations produced by inflation. A power-law parameterisation of the primordial power spectrum is often used to…
Recent observations by pulsar timing arrays (PTAs) such as NANOGrav, EPTA, PPTA, and CPTA suggest the presence of nanohertz stochastic gravitational wave background (GWB). While such signals could be explained by gravitational waves from a…
Chiral cosmic strings naturally arise in many particle physics models, in particular in supersymmetric theories with a D-term. These strings have a single fermion zero mode in the core. We derive the general equation of motion for such…
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…
We review applications of string theory to cosmology, from primordial times to the present-day accelerated expansion. Starting with a brief overview of cosmology and string compactifications, we discuss in detail moduli stabilisation,…
The pulsar timing array (PTA) collaborations have recently reported compelling evidence for the presence of a stochastic signal consistent with a gravitational-wave background. In this letter, we combine the latest data sets from NANOGrav,…
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…
Local and distant measurements of the Hubble constant are in significant tension: local measurements of the Hubble constant appear to show a Universe that is significantly contracted when compared to distant measurements. From the point of…
Highly beamed, short-duration electromagnetic bursts could be produced by superconducting cosmic string (SCS) loops oscillating in cosmic magnetic fields. We demonstrated that the basic characteristics of SCS bursts such as the…