The Revival of Cosmic Strings

Abstract

Cosmic strings are one-dimensional topological defects which could have been formed in the early stages of our Universe. They triggered a lot of interest, mainly for their cosmological implications: they could offer an alternative to inflation for the generation of density perturbations. It was shown however that cosmic strings lead to inconsistencies with the measurements of the cosmic microwave background temperature anisotropies. The picture is changed recently. It was shown that, on the one hand, cosmic strings can be generically formed in the framework of supersymmetric grand unified theories and that, on the other hand, cosmic superstrings could play the rôle of cosmic strings. There is also some possible observational support. All this lead to a revival of cosmic strings research and this is the topic of my lecture.

13 pages, Invited Lecture in " Pomeranian Workshop in Fundamental Cosmology" (Poland 2005), to be published in Annalen der Physik

References in corpus (9)

• Gravitational radiation from cosmic (super)strings: bursts, stochastic background, and observational windows
• Bounds on Cosmic Strings from WMAP and SDSS
• Scaling of Multi-Tension Cosmic Superstring Networks
• A Note on the evolution of cosmic string/superstring networks
• Constraints on Supersymmetric Grand Unified Theories from Cosmology
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Cited by in corpus (9)

• Cosmic Strings and Cosmic Superstrings
• Cosmic Strings
• Observational constraints on light cosmic strings from photometry and pulsar timing
• D-term inflation in non-minimal supergravity
• Probing Neutrino Dark Energy with Extremely High-Energy Cosmic Neutrinos
• Production of Topological Defects at the End of Inflation
• Production of topological defects at the end of inflation
• General relativistic density perturbations
• Finite temperature corrections and embedded strings in noncommutative geometry and the standard model with neutrino mixing