Related papers: The Fate of Cosmic String Zero Modes

The effect of fermionic string conductivity by purely right (or purely left) moving ``zero modes'' is shown to be governed by a simple Lagrangian characterising a certain ``chiral'' (null current carrying) string model whose dynamical…

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…

I review recent work concerning the microphysics of cosmic string solutions of N=1 supersymmetric gauge field theories.

We consider the cosmological consequences of a network of superconducting cosmic strings. For strong enough current the period of friction domination never ends. Instead a plasma scaling solution is reached. We demonstrate that this gives…

Flat directions are a generic feature of the scalar potential in supersymmetric gauge field theories. They can arise, for example, from D-terms associated with an extra abelian gauge symmetry. Even when supersymmetry is broken softly, there…

The mystery of the cosmological constant is probably the most pressing obstacle to significantly improving the models of elementary particle physics derived from string theory. The problem arises because in the standard framework of low…

A general condition for the existence of fermion zero modes is derived for the M-5-brane, the M-2-brane and the D=4, N=2 Majumdar-Papapetrou 0-brane. The fermion zero modes of these p-branes do not exist if the supersymmetry spinor…

We argue that the light particles in string theory obey an effective quantum mechanics modified by the inclusion of a quantum-gravitational friction term, induced by unavoidable couplings to unobserved massive string states in the…

We investigate the microphysics of supersymmetric cosmic strings. In particular we focus on the vortices admitted by N=1 supersymmetric abelian Higgs models. We find the vortex solutions and demonstrate that the two simplest supersymmetric…

I present two interesting studies related to the role of solitons in theories with spontaneous symmetry breaking. Quantised fermions coupled to solitons are known to induce fractional fermion number. I present an example where an unstable…

We report that axions and photons exhibit instability in the presence of cosmic strings that are carrying magnetic flux in their core. The strength of the instability is determined by the symmetry breaking scale of the cosmic string theory.…

We study string theory on orbifolds in the presence of an antisymmetric constant background field and discuss some of new aspects of the theory. It is shown that the term with the antisymmetric field has a topological nature like a…

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 study cosmic strings in the complex symmetron model, a scalar-tensor theory with a spontaneously broken local $U(1)$ symmetry in low matter density regions. Using numerical simulations, we show that these strings preferentially attach to…

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…

We study the quantum stabilization of a cosmic string by a heavy fermion doublet in a reduced version of the standard model. We show that charged strings, obtained by populating fermionic bound state levels, become stable if the…

Cosmic strings are predicted in many models beyond the Standard Model of particle physics. In models which admit strings, a network of strings will inevitably be formed in a phase transition in the early universe and will persist to the…

We argue that having an odd number of Majorana fermion zero modes on a dynamical point-like soliton signifies an inconsistency in a theory with 3+1 and higher dimensions. We check this statement in a couple of examples in field theory and…

We investigate the cosmological consequences of particle physics theories that admit stable loops of superconducting cosmic string - {\it vortons}. General symmetry breaking schemes are considered, in which strings are formed at one energy…

A synthesis of previous work done on the microscopic structure of cosmic strings in realistic models is made and reveals that strings are expected to be not only superconducting in the sense of Witten, but also generically current-carrying,…