Light from Cosmic Strings

Abstract

The time-dependent metric of a cosmic string leads to an effective interaction between the string and photons - the "gravitational Aharonov-Bohm" effect -- and causes cosmic strings to emit light. We evaluate the radiation of pairs of photons from cosmic strings and find that the emission from cusps, kinks and kink-kink collisions occurs with a flat spectrum at all frequencies up to the string scale. Further, cusps emit a beam of photons, kinks emit along a curve, and the emission at a kink-kink collision is in all directions. The emission of light from cosmic strings could provide an important new observational signature of cosmic strings that is within reach of current experiments for a range of string tensions.

8 pages, 1 figure

References in corpus (5)

• Gravitational wave bursts from cusps and kinks on cosmic strings
• Kinks and small-scale structure on cosmic strings
• Cosmic Rays from Cosmic Strings with Condensates
• Aharonov-Bohm Radiation
• Aharonov-Bohm Radiation of Fermions

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• Seeking String Theory in the Cosmos
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• Radio Broadcasts from Superconducting Strings
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• Radio bursts from superconducting strings
• Monopoles, strings and dark matter
• Superconducting cosmic strings as sources of cosmological fast radio bursts
• Finite temperature fermionic charge and current densities induced by a cosmic string with magnetic flux
• Cosmic string bursts in LISA
• Repeated Gravitational Wave Bursts from Cosmic Strings
• Cosmic superstring trajectories in warped compactifications
• Primordial magnetic fields from the string network
• Gravitational Scattering Of Photons Off Cosmic Strings