2007/04/30 by Neil Bevis, Mark Hindmarsh, M. Kunz +2 · 6 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Black Holes and Theoretical Physics #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Radio Astronomy Observations and Technology #astro-ph #hep-th
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevd.76.043005
published as Phys.Rev.D76:043005,2007 · 12 pages, 5 figures. Minor re-phrasings. Matches final print version
openalex publication_date 2007/08/24 · arxiv created 2007/08/28 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We present the first calculation of the possible (local) cosmic string contribution to the cosmic microwave background polarization spectra from simulations of a string network (rather than a stochastic collection of unconnected string segments). We use field-theory simulations of the Abelian Higgs model to represent local U(1) strings, including their radiative decay and microphysics. Relative to previous estimates, our calculations show a shift in power to larger angular scales, making the chance of a future cosmic string detection from the B-mode polarization slightly greater. We explore a future ground-based polarization detector, taking the CLOVER project as our example. In the null hypothesis (that cosmic strings make a zero contribution) we find that CLOVER should limit the string tension \ensuremathμ to G\ensuremathμ<0.12\ifmmode×\else\texttimes\fi10^\ensuremath-6 (where G is the gravitational constant), above which it is likely that a detection would be possible.