Cosmic Strings in Hidden Sectors: 2. Cosmological and Astrophysical Signatures

Abstract

Cosmic strings can arise in hidden sector models with a spontaneously broken Abelian symmetry group. We have studied the couplings of the Standard Model fields to these so-called dark strings in the companion paper. Here we survey the cosmological and astrophysical observables that could be associated with the presence of dark strings in our universe with an emphasis on low-scale models, perhaps TeV. Specifically, we consider constraints from nucleosynthesis and CMB spectral distortions, and we calculate the predicted fluxes of diffuse gamma ray cascade photons and cosmic rays. For strings as light as TeV, we find that the predicted level of these signatures is well below the sensitivity of the current experiments, and therefore low scale cosmic strings in hidden sectors remain unconstrained. Heavier strings with a mass scale in the range 10^(13) GeV to 10^(15) GeV are at tension with nucleosynthesis constraints.

32 pages, 7 figures

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Cited by in corpus (8)

• Emission of gravitational waves by superconducting cosmic strings
• N=2 SUSY Abelian Higgs model with hidden sector and BPS equations
• Stabilisation of semilocal strings by dark scalar condensates
• Crescendo Beyond the Horizon: More Gravitational Waves from Domain Walls Bounded by Inflated Cosmic Strings
• Generalized Maxwell-Higgs vortices in models with enhanced symmetry
• High-Energy Astrophysical Neutrinos from Cosmic Strings
• Exponentially generalized vortex
• Radiation of Supersymmetric Particles from Aharonov-Bohm R-string