Related papers: A Tutorial on Links between Cosmic String Theory a…
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,…
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…
Cosmic (super)strings offer promising ways to test ideas about the early universe and physics at high energies. While in field theory constructions their tension is usually assumed to be constant (or at most slowly-varying), this is often…
In the context of brane world scenario, cosmic superstrings can be formed in D-brane annihilation at the end of the brane inflationary era. The cosmic superstring network has a scaling solution and the characteristic scale of the network is…
Superstring theory has continued to develop at a rapid clip in the past few years. Following a quick review of some of the major discoveries prior to 1998, this talk focuses on a few of the more recent developments. The topics I have chosen…
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…
Cosmic superstrings are expected to be formed at the end of brane inflation, within the context of brane-world cosmological models inspired from string theory. By studying properties of cosmic suprestring networks, and comparing their…
We review the properties and evolution of strings networks containing both a spectrum of string tensions as well as Y-junctions, namely a point at which three different strings meet. Such a situation is expected in cosmic superstring…
It is possible that superstrings, as well as other one-dimensional branes, could have been produced in the early universe and then expanded to cosmic size today. I discuss the conditions under which this will occur, and the signatures of…
We present the properties of a cosmic superstring network in the scenario of flux compactification. An infinite family of strings, the (p,q)-strings, are allowed to exist. The flux compactification leads to a string tension that is periodic…
We show that the naive application of the Kibble mechanism seriously underestimates the initial density of cosmic superstrings that can be formed during the annihilation of D-branes in the early universe, as in models of brane-antibrane…
In this thesis we investigate the microphysics of cosmic strings in non-minimal quantum field theories. In particular we consider theories in which fermion fields couple to the strings, and those with larger symmetry groups, such as grand…
The gravitational wave (GW) signals emitted by a network of cosmic strings are reexamined in view of the possible formation of a network of cosmic superstrings at the end of brane inflation. The reconnection probability $p$ of intersecting…
Towards the end of the brane inflationary epoch in the brane world, cosmic strings (but not texture, domain walls or monopoles) are copiously produced during brane collision. These cosmic strings are D$p$-branes with $(p-1)$ dimensions…
We model the behaviour of a network of interacting (p,q) strings from IIB string theory by considering a field theory containing multiple species of string, allowing us to study the effect of non-intercommuting events due to two different…
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 discuss the formation of cosmic strings or macroscopic color flux tubes at the phase transition from the deconfinement to confinement phase in pure Yang-Mills (YM) theory, such as SU($N$), Sp($N$), SO($N$), and Spin($N$), based on the…
I will briefly review the formation and evolution of cosmic superstrings, in the context of brane-world cosmological models within M-theory. These objects can play the role of cosmic strings, offering a variety of astrophysical…
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…