Gravitational Wave Bursts from Cosmic String Cusps and Pseudocusps

Understand

We study the relative contribution of cusps and pseudocusps, on cosmic (super)strings, to the emitted bursts of gravitational waves.

• The gravitational wave emission in the vicinity of highly relativistic points on the string follows, for a high enough frequency, a logarithmic decrease.
• The slope has been analytically found to be $^{-4}/_3$ for points reaching exactly the speed of light in the limit $c=1$.
• We investigate the variations of this high frequency behaviour with respect to the velocity of the points considered, for strings formed through a numerical simulation, and we then compute numerically the gravitational waves emitted.