Related papers: Cosmic strings reborn?
We study the effect of free streaming in a universe with cosmic strings with time-varying tension as well as with constant tension. Although current cosmological observations suggest that fluctuation seeded by cosmic strings cannot be the…
String theory is accused by some of its critics to be a purely abstract mathematical discipline, having lost the contact to the simple yet deeply rooted questions which physics provided until the beginning of this century. We argue that, in…
I briefly review several important formal theory developments in quantum field theory and string theory that were reported at ICHEP conferences in past decades, and explain how they underlie a new research area referred to as physical or…
In this paper we will discuss how cosmic strings can be used to bridge the gap between the local geometry of our spacetime model and the global topology. The primary tool is the theory of foliations and surfaces, and together with…
Recent developments in superstring theory have led to major advances in understanding. After reviewing where things stood earlier, we sketch the impact of recently identified dualities and D-branes, as well as a hidden eleventh dimension.
Some of the phenomenological implications of string cosmological models are reviewed, with particular attention to the spectra of the tensor, scalar and vector modes of the geometry. A class of self-dual string cosmological models is…
This is a short review on strings in curved spacetimes. We start by recalling the classical and quantum string behaviour in singular plane waves backgrounds. We then report on the string behaviour in cosmological spacetimes (FRW, de Sitter,…
Talk given at the ``4th Hellenic School on Elementary Particle Physics", Corfu, 2-20 September 1992: The propagation of strings in cosmological space-time backgrounds is reviewed. We show the relation of a special class of cosmological…
Recent astrophysical observations have motivated novel theoretical models of the dark matter sector. A class of such models predicts the existence of GeV scale cosmic strings that communicate with the standard model sector by Aharonov-Bohm…
We consider strings with the Nambu action as extremal surfaces in a given space-time, thus, we ignore their back reaction. Especially, we look for strings sharing one symmetry with the underlying space-time. If this is a non-null symmetry,…
In this letter we uncover a new parametric resonance of axionic cosmic strings. This process is triggered by the presence on the string of internal mode excitations that resonantly amplify the amplitude of transverse displacements of the…
We comment on the relation between string theory and empirical science, grounding our discussion in cosmology, a subject with increasingly precise data in which this connection operates at several levels. It is important to take into…
The past year has seen enormous progress in string theory. It has become clear that all of the different string theories are different limits of a single theory. Moreover, in certain limits, one obtains a new, eleven-dimensional structure…
Recent advances in string theory and inflationary cosmology have led to a surge of interest in the possible existence of an ensemble of cosmic regions, or universes, among the members of which key physical parameters, such as the masses of…
This article contains a short review of the current status of string theory.
The search for a theory of quantum gravity faces two great challenges: the incredibly small scales of the Planck length and time, and the possibility that the observed constants of nature are in part the result of random processes. A…
A brief review of the status of duality symmetries in string theory is presented. The evidence is accumulating rapidly that an enormous group of duality symmetries, including perturbative T dualities and non-perturbative S-dualities,…
It is shown that brane world gravity produces an attractive force between cosmic strings, in contrast to conventional Einstein gravity. This force is sufficient for stable bound states of Type II strings (which normally repel each other) to…
One of the most interesting predictions of string-inspired cosmological models is the presence of a stochastic background of relic gravitational waves in the frequency band accessible to Earth-based detectors. Here we consider a ``minimal''…
We investigate in detail the gravitational wave signal from kinks on cosmic (super)strings, including the kinematical effects from the internal extra dimensions. We find that the signal is suppressed, however, the effect is less significant…