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.
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