Radially stabilized inflating cosmic strings

Understand

In General Relativity, cosmic strings are well known to produce a static, locally flat spacetime with a wedge removed.

• If the tension exceeds a critical value, the deficit angle becomes larger than $ 2\pi $, leading to a compact exterior that ends in a conical singularity.
• In this work, we investigate dynamical solutions for cosmic strings with super-critical tensions.
• To this end, we model the string as a cylindrical shell of finite and stabilized transverse width and show that there is a marginally super-critical regime in which the stabilization can be achieved by physically reasonable matter.