English

Breaking the Strings: the signatures of Cosmic String Loop Fragmentation

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2025-12-12 v2 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology

Abstract

We study the impact of fragmentation on the cosmic string loop number density, using an approach inspired by the three-scale model and a Boltzmann equation. We build a new formulation designed to be more amenable to numerical resolution and present two complementary numerical methods to obtain the full loop distribution including the effect of fragmentation and gravitational radiation. We show that fragmentation generically predicts a decay of the loop number density on large scales and a deviation from a pure power-law. We expect fragmentation to be crucial for the calibration of loop distribution models.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2508.11596,
  title  = {Breaking the Strings: the signatures of Cosmic String Loop Fragmentation},
  author = {Pierre Auclair},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2508.11596},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

18 pages, 7 figures, matches published version in JCAP

R2 v1 2026-07-01T04:52:13.158Z