Cosmic Strings in Hidden Sectors: 2. Cosmological and Astrophysical Signatures

Understand

Cosmic strings can arise in hidden sector models with a spontaneously broken Abelian symmetry group.

• We have studied the couplings of the Standard Model fields to these so-called dark strings in the companion paper.
• Here we survey the cosmological and astrophysical observables that could be associated with the presence of dark strings in our universe with an emphasis on low-scale models, perhaps TeV.
• Specifically, we consider constraints from nucleosynthesis and CMB spectral distortions, and we calculate the predicted fluxes of diffuse gamma ray cascade photons and cosmic rays.