Cosmic Sparks from Superconducting Strings

Understand

We investigate cosmic sparks from cusps on superconducting cosmic strings in light of the recently discovered millisecond radio burst by Lorimer et al [1].

• We find that the observed duration, fluence, spectrum, and event rate can be reasonably explained by Grand Unification scale superconducting cosmic strings that carry currents \sim 10^5 GeV.
• The superconducting string model predicts an event rate that falls off only as S^{-1/2}, where S is the energy flux, and hence predicts a population of very bright bursts.
• Other surveys, with different observational parameters, are shown to impose tight constraints on the superconducting string model.