Radio Broadcasts from Superconducting Strings

Understand

Superconducting cosmic strings can give transient electromagnetic signatures that we argue are most evident at radio frequencies.

• We investigate the three different kinds of radio bursts from cusps, kinks, and kink-kink collisions on superconducting strings.
• We find that the event rate is dominated by kink bursts in a range of parameters that are of observational interest, and can be quite high (several a day at 1 Jy flux) for a canonical set of parameters.
• In the absence of events, the search for radio transients can place stringent constraints on superconducting cosmic strings.