Related papers: Breaking Cosmic Strings without Monopoles
Cosmic strings and primordial black holes (PBHs) commonly and naturally form in many scenarios describing the early universe. Here we show that if both cosmic strings and PBHs are present, their interaction leads to a range of interesting…
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 study the structure of cosmic strings produced at the breaking of an anomalous U(1) gauge symmetry present in many superstring compactification models. We show that their coupling with the axion necessary in order to cancel the anomalies…
We discuss the pair creation of black holes by the breaking of a cosmic string. We obtain an instanton describing this process from the $C$ metric, and calculate its probability. This is very low for the strings that have been suggested for…
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…
${\rm B - L}$ cosmic strings form in a wide class of theories beyond the Standard Model which contain a ${\rm U}(1)_{{\rm B - L}}$ gauge symmetry. They can form at the end of hybrid inflation and explain, together with inflation, the Cosmic…
Macroscopic fundamental and Dirichlet strings have several potential instabilities: breakage, tachyon decays, and confinement by axion domain walls. We investigate the conditions under which metastable strings can exist, and we find that…
Global topological defects produce nonzero stress-energy throughout spacetime, and as a result can have observable gravitational influence on surrounding matter. Gravitational effects of global strings are used to place bounds on their…
Cosmic strings are one-dimensional topological defects which could have been formed in the early stages of our Universe. They triggered a lot of interest, mainly for their cosmological implications: they could offer an alternative to…
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…
Cosmic strings are linear concentrations of energy that form whenever phase transitions in the early universe break axial symmetries as originally shown by Kibble. They are the result of frustrated order in the quantum fields responsible…
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…
Gregory and Laflamme showed that certain nonextremal black strings (and p-branes) are unstable to linearized perturbations. It is widely believed that this instability will cause the black string horizon to classically pinch off and then…
We review the properties of static, higher dimensional black hole solutions in theories where non-abelian gauge fields are minimally coupled to gravity. It is shown that black holes with hyperspherically symmetric horizon topology do not…
Making use of the wealth of new observational data coming from the sky it is possible to constrain particle physics theories beyond the Standard Model. One way to do this is illustrated in this article: a subset of theories admits cosmic…
Cosmic strings are predicted by many field-theory models, and may have been formed at a symmetry-breaking transition early in the history of the universe, such as that associated with grand unification. They could have important…
We consider new cosmological solutions with a collapsing, an intermediate and an expanding phase. The boundary between the expanding (collapsing) phase and the intermediate phase is seen by comoving observers as a cosmological past (future)…
Cosmic strings are topological defects thought to have formed early in the life of the universe. If such objects exist, a study of their interaction with black holes is of interest. The equations of motion of a cosmic string have the form…
We perform the numerical field evolution for the collision of two Abelian type I cosmic strings. We present evidence that, for collisions at small but characteristic relative velocities and angles, these cosmic strings do not exchange ends…
We study the formation of monopoles and strings in a model where SU(3) is spontaneously broken to U(2)=[SU(2)\times U(1)]/\ZZ_2, and then to U(1). The first symmetry breaking generates monopoles with both SU(2) and U(1) charges since the…