Related papers: Metastable cosmic strings are broken at the start
The separation of a heavy quark and antiquark pair leads to the formation of a tube of flux, or string, which should break in the presence of light quark-antiquark pairs. This expected zero temperature phenomenon has proven elusive in…
If the Universe underwent a cosmic phase transition, it may have left behind a network of cosmic strings. When these strings arise from the breaking of a gauge symmetry, their decay produces a significant stochastic background of…
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, 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,…
We investigate the decay of current on a superconducting cosmic string through quantum tunneling. We construct the instanton describing tunneling in a simple bosonic string model, and estimate the decay rate. The tunneling rate vanishes in…
Towards the end of the brane inflationary epoch in the brane world, cosmic strings (but not texture, domain walls or monopoles) are copiously produced during brane collision. These cosmic strings are D$p$-branes with $(p-1)$ dimensions…
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…
We investigate cosmic sparks from cusps on superconducting cosmic strings in light of the recently discovered millisecond radio burst by Lorimer et al [1]. We find that the observed duration, fluence, spectrum, and event rate can be…
We consider the propagation of classical and quantum strings on cosmological space-times which interpolate from a collapsing phase to an expanding phase. We begin by considering the classical propagation of strings on space-times with…
The North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav) has recently reported strong evidence for a stochastic common-spectrum process affecting the pulsar timing residuals in its 12.5-year data set. We demonstrate that…
Electromagnetic radiation from superconducting cosmic string loops can reionize neutral hydrogen in the universe at very early epochs, and affect the cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature and polarization correlation functions at…
The interaction of defects can lead to a phenomenon of erasure. During this process, a lower-dimensional object gets absorbed and dissolved by a higher-dimensional one. The phenomenon is very general and has a wide range of implications,…
In a recent paper, the NANOGrav collaboration studied new physics explanations of the observed pulsar timing residuals consistent with a stochastic gravitational wave background (SGWB), including cosmic strings in the Nambu-Goto (NG)…
Brane inflation in superstring theory ends when branes collide, initiating the hot big bang. Cosmic superstrings are produced during the brane collision. The cosmic superstrings produced in a D3-brane-antibrane inflationary scenario have a…
We consider the possibility of a bosonic (meta)stabilization of a cosmic gauge string loop due to the presence of a gas of low mass bosonic particles which become trapped within the string core. This boson gas exerts a pressure which tends…
We calculate the probability of destruction of a metastable string by collisions of the Goldstone bosons, corresponding to the transverse waves on the string. We find a general formula that allows to determine the probability of the string…
Breaking of an atomic chain under stress is a collective many-particle tunneling phenomenon. We study classical dynamics in imaginary time by using conformal mapping technique, and derive an analytic formula for the probability of breaking.…
We argue that cosmic strings with high winding numbers generally form in first-order gauge symmetry breaking phase transitions, and we demonstrate this using computer simulations. These strings are heavier than single-winding strings and…
We present the first complete Markov chain Monte Carlo analysis of cosmological models with evolving cosmic (super)string networks, using the unconnected segment model in the unequal-time correlator formalism. For ordinary cosmic string…
In these lectures, I review the current status of cosmic strings and cosmic superstrings. I first discuss topological defects in the context of Grand Unified Theories, focusing in particular in cosmic strings arising as gauge theory…