Monopole annihilation in cosmic necklaces

Abstract

A sequence of two symmetry breaking transitions in the early universe may produce monopoles whose flux is confined into two strings each, which thus assemble into "necklaces" with monopoles as beads. Such "cosmic necklaces" have been proposed as a source of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays. We analyze the evolution of these systems and show that essentially all monopoles annihilate or leave the string at early times, after which cosmic necklaces evolve in a similar way to a network of ordinary cosmic strings. We investigate several modifications to the basic picture, but in nearly all cases we find that too few monopoles remain on the necklaces to produce any observable cosmic rays. There may be a small window for superconducting condensates to prevent annihilations, but only if both the string and the condensate scale are very high.

17 pages, 4 figures. Major revision discussing many additional scenarios.

References in corpus (6)

• Observation of the suppression of the flux of cosmic rays above 4x10^19eV
• Measurement of the energy spectrum of cosmic rays above 10^18 eV using the Pierre Auger Observatory
• Gravitational Waves from Broken Cosmic Strings: The Bursts and the Beads
• Cosmic Necklaces from String Theory
• Lumps in the throat
• String Necklaces and Primordial Black Holes from Type IIB Strings

Cited by in corpus (17)

• Beyond the Standard Models with Cosmic Strings
• Gravitational Waves from Broken Cosmic Strings: The Bursts and the Beads
• Primordial Black Hole Archaeology with Gravitational Waves from Cosmic Strings
• Cosmic strings and primordial black holes
• Monopoles, strings and dark matter
• New solutions for non-Abelian cosmic strings
• Cosmic Strings as Emitters of Extremely High Energy Neutrinos
• Numerical simulations of necklaces in SU(2) gauge-Higgs field theory
• Gauge Kinetic Mixing and Dark Topological Defects
• Evolution of Cosmic Necklaces and Lattices
• Scaling in necklaces of monopoles and semipoles
• Ultra High Energy Neutrinos: Absorption, Thermal Effects and Signatures
• A Generalisation of the Nielsen-Olesen Vortex: Non-cylindrical strings in a modified Abelian-Higgs model
• Can Superconducting Cosmic Strings Piercing Seed Black Holes Generate Supermassive Black Holes in the Early Universe?
• Evolution of FLRW spacetime after the birth of a cosmic string
• A left-right SU(7) symmetric model with D-parity cosmic strings
• Lumpy cosmic strings