Related papers: Metastable cosmic strings are broken at the start
Topological defects, in particular cosmic strings, give rise to an interesting mechanism for generating the primordial perturbations in the early Universe which are required to explain the present structure. An overview of the cosmic string…
We review the main results of our investigations motivated by the tadpole potentials of ten-dimensional strings with broken supersymmetry. While these are at best partial indications, it is hard to resist the feeling that they do capture…
We investigate the contribution made by small loops from a cosmic string network as seeds for large-scale structure formation. We show that cosmic string loops are highly correlated with the long-string network on large scales and therefore…
We discuss the formation of cosmic strings or macroscopic color flux tubes after the deconfinement/confinement phase transition in the pure Yang-Mills theory. Based on holographic dual descriptions, these cosmic strings can be interpreted…
The network of cosmic strings generated in a phase transition during inflation enters the scaling regime later than that of usual strings. If it occurs after the recombination, temperature anisotropies of the cosmic microwave background…
Cosmic superstrings of string theory differ from conventional cosmic strings of field theory. We review how the physical and cosmological properties of the macroscopic string loops influence experimental searches for these relics from the…
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…
Supersymmetry breaking in string theory is expected to occur when moduli fields acquire non-trivial expectation values. In the early universe these fields start out displaced from their final destinations. I present some recent ideas about…
Cosmic strings can arise in hidden sector models with a spontaneously broken Abelian symmetry group. We have studied the couplings of the Standard Model fields to these so-called dark strings in the companion paper. Here we survey the…
We investigate cosmological evolution and implications of cosmic strings with time-dependent tension. We derive basic equations of time development of the correlation length and the velocity of such strings, based on the one scale model.…
Appearance of cosmic strings in the early Universe is a common manifestation of new physics typically linked to some high energy scale. In this paper, we discuss a different situation, where a model underlying cosmic string formation is…
We discuss the appearance of topological structures from the spontaneous breaking of $E_6$ to the Standard Model via its maximal subgroup $SO(10) \times U(1)_\psi$. They include dumbbells, metastable strings, as well as domain walls bounded…
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…
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…
We study the cosmic microwave background temperature and polarisation spectra sourced by multi-tension cosmic superstring networks. First we obtain solutions for the characteristic length scales and velocities associated with the evolution…
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…
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…
We analyze cosmic superstring models in light of NANOGrav 15-year pulsar timing data. A good fit is found for a string tension $G \mu \sim 10^{-12} - 10^{-11}$ and a string intercommutation probability $p \sim 10^{-3} - 10^{-1}$.…
Supersymmetry breaking in a metastable vacuum is re-examined in a cosmological context. It is shown that thermal effects generically drive the Universe to the metastable minimum even if it begins in the supersymmetry-preserving one. This is…
In cosmological scenarios based on grand unification, string theory or braneworlds, many kinds of topological or non-topological defects, including monopoles and cosmic strings, are predicted to be formed in the early universe. Here we…