Gravitational Waves from Current-Carrying Cosmic Strings

Understand

Cosmic strings are predicted by many Standard Model extensions involving the cosmological breaking of a symmetry with nontrivial first homotopy group and represent a potential source of primordial gravitational waves (GWs).

• Present efforts to model the GW signal from cosmic strings are often based on minimal models, such as, eg, the Nambu--Goto action that describes cosmic strings as exactly one-dimensional objects without any internal structure.
• In order to arrive at more realistic predictions, it is therefore necessary to consider nonminimal models that make an attempt at accounting for the microscopic properties of cosmic strings.
• With this goal in mind, we derive in this paper the GW spectrum emitted by current-carrying cosmic strings (CCCSs), which may form in a variety of cosmological scenarios.