Irreducible cosmic production of relic vortons

Abstract

The existence of a scaling network of current-carrying cosmic strings in our Universe is expected to continuously create loops endowed with a conserved current during the cosmological expansion. These loops radiate gravitational waves and may stabilise into centrifugally supported configurations. We show that this process generates an irreducible population of vortons which has not been considered so far. In particular, we expect vortons to be massively present today even if no loops are created at the time of string formation. We determine their cosmological distribution, and estimate their relic abundance today as a function of both the string tension and the current energy scale. This allows us to rule out new domains of this parameter space. At the same time, given some conditions on the string current, vortons are shown to provide a viable and original dark matter candidate, possibly for all values of the string tension. Their mass, spin and charge spectrum being broad, vortons would have an unusual phenomenology in dark matter searches.

27 pages, 6 figures, uses jcappub. Discussions and references added, matches published version

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Cited by in corpus (10)

• Gravitational Waves from Current-Carrying Cosmic Strings
• A window for cosmic strings
• CMB anisotropies generated by cosmic string loops
• Quantum current dissipation in superconducting strings and vortons
• Stochastic gravitational waves from long cosmic strings
• Pinching instabilities in superconducting strings
• Cosmic Microwave Background Signatures from Current-carrying Cosmic Strings
• Gravitational field and lensing of a circular chiral vorton
• Stable cosmic vortons in bosonic field theory
• Current induction and macroscopic forces for superconducting strings