2004/05/31 by Mark G. Jackson, Mark G Jackson, Nicholas T. Jones +2 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #Black Holes and Theoretical Physics #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Pulsars and Gravitational Waves Research #hep-th
paper · pdf · doi:10.1088/1126-6708/2005/10/013
published as JHEP 0510:013,2005 · 42 pages, 7 figures; v.2: added references, expanded discussion of reconnection in field theory
arxiv created 2005/08/10 · openalex publication_date 2005/10/05 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/04
Recent work suggests that fundamental and Dirichlet strings, and their (p,q) bound states, may be observed as cosmic strings. The evolution of cosmic string networks, and therefore their observational signals, depends on what happens when two strings collide. We study this in string perturbation theory for collisions between all possible pairs of strings; different cases involve sphere, disk, and annulus amplitudes. The result also depends on the details of compactification; the dependence on ratios of scales is only logarithmic, but this is still numerically important. We study a range of models and parameters, and find that in most cases these strings can be distinguished from cosmic strings that arise as gauge theory solitons.