Textures in Dilaton Gravity

We examine the field equations of a self-gravitating texture in low-energy superstring gravity, allowing for an arbitrary coupling of the texture field to the dilaton. Both massive and massless dilatons are considered. For the massless dilaton non-singular spacetimes exist, but only for certain values of the coupling, dependent on the gravitational strength of the texture; moreover, this non-singular behaviour exists only in a certain frame. For the massive dilaton, the texture induces a long-range dilaton cloud, but we expect the gravitational behaviour of the defect to be similar to that found in Einstein theory. We compare these results with those found for other global topological defects.