Related papers: Characterizing a cosmic string with the statistics…

As the Universe expands, the redshift of distant sources changes with time. Here we discuss gravitational lensing phenomena that are consequence of the redshift drift between lensed source, gravitational lens, and observer. When the source…

We examine the shadow cast by a Kerr black hole pierced by a cosmic string. The observable images depend not only on the black hole spin parameter and the angle of inclination, but also on the deficit angle yielded by the cosmic string. The…

We investigate a static, cylindrically symmetric cosmic string on the brane without a perturbative approximation. We find there could be a (large) enhancement of the (effective) string tension when the energy density at the center of the…

We study the effect of weak lensing by cosmic (super-)strings on the anisotropies of cosmic microwave background (CMB). In developing a method to calculate the lensing convergence field due to strings, and thereby temperature and…

We study the occurrence of cuspy events on a light string stretched between two Y-junctions with fixed heavy strings. We first present an analytic study and give a solid criterion to discriminate between cuspy and non-cuspy string…

Strong lensing time delay cosmography has excellent complementarity with other dark energy probes, and will soon have abundant systems detected. We investigate two issues in the imaging and spectroscopic followup required to obtain the time…

We explore a new technique to measure cosmic shear using Einstein rings. In Birrer et al. (2017), we showed that the detailed modelling of Einstein rings can be used to measure external shear to high precision. In this letter, we explore…

We put robust upper limits on the average cosmological density \Omega_s of cosmic strings based on the variability properties of a large homogeneous sample of SDSS quasars. We search for an excess of characteristic variations of quasar…

This article, written for Scolarpedia, provides a brief introduction into the subject of cosmic strings, together with a review of their main properties, cosmological evolution and observational signatures.

We investigate the properties of global cosmic string networks as a function of the ratio of string tension to Goldstone-field coupling, and as a function of the Hubble damping strength. Our results show unambiguously that the string…

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…

LISA might detect gravitational waves from mergers of massive black hole binaries strongly lensed by intervening galaxies (Sereno et al. 2010). The detection of multiple gravitational lensing events would provide a new tool for cosmography.…

The time-dependent metric of a cosmic string leads to an effective interaction between the string and photons - the "gravitational Aharonov-Bohm" effect -- and causes cosmic strings to emit light. We evaluate the radiation of pairs of…

We account for particle emission and gravitational radiation from cosmic string loops to determine their effect on the loop distribution and observational signatures of strings. The effect of particle emission is that the number density of…

The search for cosmic strings has been of renewed interest with the advent of precision cosmology. In this note we give a quantitative description of the nonlinear matter density fluctuations that can form from a scaling network of cosmic…

In this work, we consider a network of cosmic strings to explain possible deviation from \Lambda CDM behaviour. We use different observational data to constrain the model and show that a small but non zero contribution from the string…

The cosmological constant is an unexplained until now phenomena of nature that requires an explanation through string effects. The apparent discrepancy between theory and experiment is enourmous and has already been explained several times…

Because cosmic superstrings generically form junctions and gauge theoretic strings typically do not, junctions may provide a signature to distinguish between cosmic superstrings and gauge theoretic cosmic strings. In cosmic microwave…

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 present density split statistics, a framework that studies lensing and counts-in-cells as a function of foreground galaxy density, thereby providing a large-scale measurement of both 2-point and 3-point statistics. Our method extends our…