We examine the question of collapse of Turok's two-parameter family of cosmic strings. We first perform a classification of the strings according to the specific time(s) at which the minimal string size is reached during one period. We then obtain an exact analytical expression for the probability of collapse to black holes for the Turok strings. Our result has the same general behavior as previously obtained in the literature but we find, in addition, a numerical prefactor that changes the result by three orders of magnitude. Finally we show that our careful computation of the prefactor helps to understand the discrepancy between previously obtained results and, in particular, that for "large" values of Gµ, there may not even be a discrepancy. We also give a simple physical argument that can immediately rule out some of the previously obtained results. * Electronic address: rnh@fysik.ou.dk † Electronic address: inane@fysik.sdu.dk ‡ Electronic address: all@fysik.ou.dk
We show that, in a pioneering paper by Polnarev and Zembowicz, some conclusions concerning the characteristics of the Turok strings are generally not correct. In addition we show that the probability of string collapse given there is off by a large prefactor (ϳ10 3 ).
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