Gravitational wave bursts from cosmic string cusps and pseudocusps

Stott, Matthew J.; Elghozi, Thomas; Sakellariadou, Mairi

doi:10.1103/physrevd.96.023533

Cited by 12 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 55 publications

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“…in agreement with our simple estimate (13). Since pseudocusps occur even more generically on loops than cusps do [77], this result further enhances the PBH formation rate.…”

Section: Pbhs From Pseudocusp Collapsesupporting

confidence: 90%

Primordial black holes from cusp collapse on cosmic strings

Jenkins,

Sakellariadou

2020

Preprint

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Primordial black holes (PBHs) are of fundamental interest in cosmology and astrophysics, and have received much attention as a dark matter candidate and as a potential source of gravitational waves. One possible PBH formation mechanism is the gravitational collapse of cosmic strings. Thus far, the entirety of the literature on PBH production from cosmic strings has focused on the collapse of (quasi)circular cosmic string loops, which make up only a tiny fraction of the cosmic loop population. We demonstrate here a novel PBH formation mechanism: the collapse of a small segment of cosmic string in the neighbourhood of a cusp. Using the hoop conjecture, we show that collapse is inevitable whenever a cusp appears on a macroscopically-large loop, forming a PBH whose mass is smaller than that of the loop by a factor of the dimensionless string tension Gµ. Since cusps are generic features of cosmic string loops, and do not rely on finely-tuned loop configurations like circular collapse, this implies that cosmic strings produce PBHs in far greater numbers than has previously been recognised. The resulting PBHs are highly spinning and boosted to ultrarelativistic velocities; they populate a unique region of the BH mass-spin parameter space, and are therefore a "smoking gun" observational signature of cosmic strings. We derive stringent new constraints on Gµ from the evaporation of cusp-collapse PBHs, and update existing constraints on Gµ from gravitational-wave searches.

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“…in agreement with our simple estimate (13). Since pseudocusps occur even more generically on loops than cusps do [77], this result further enhances the PBH formation rate.…”

Section: Pbhs From Pseudocusp Collapsesupporting

confidence: 90%

Primordial black holes from cusp collapse on cosmic strings

Jenkins,

Sakellariadou

2020

Preprint

Self Cite

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“…In certain cases, computational resources do not allow us to compute as many harmonics as recommended above. In particular, some loops have "pseudocusps" [56,57], places where X ′ + and X ′ − come close without crossing. Because such a point is not an actual cusp, it is handled by direct computation, rather than our cusp code.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Stochastic gravitational wave background from smoothed cosmic string loops

Blanco-Pillado¹,

Olum²

2017

Phys. Rev. D

191

227

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We do a complete calculation of the stochastic gravitational wave background to be expected from cosmic strings. We start from a population of string loops taken from simulations, smooth these by Lorentzian convolution as a model of gravitational back reaction, calculate the average spectrum of gravitational waves emitted by the string population at any given time, and propagate it through a standard model cosmology to find the stochastic background today. We take into account all known effects, including changes in the number of cosmological relativistic degrees of freedom at early times and the possibility that some energy is in rare bursts that we might never have observed.

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“…Note that the consideration of pseudo-cusps, pieces of string moving at highly relativistic velocities, might also play a role [142,143].…”

Section: Beyond the Nambu-goto Approximationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Beyond the Standard Models with cosmic strings

Gouttenoire

Servant

Simakachorn

2020

J. Cosmol. Astropart. Phys.

134

204

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We examine which information on the early cosmological history can be extracted from the potential measurement by third-generation gravitational-wave observatories of a stochastic gravitational wave background (SGWB) produced by cosmic strings. We consider a variety of cosmological scenarios breaking the scale-invariant properties of the spectrum, such as early long matter or kination eras, short intermediate matter and inflation periods inside a radiation era, and their specific signatures on the SGWB. This requires to go beyond the usually-assumed scaling regime, to take into account the transient effects during the change of equation of state of the universe. We compute the time evolution of the string network parameters and thus the loop-production efficiency during the transient regime, and derive the corresponding shift in the turning-point frequency. We consider the impact of particle production on the gravitational-wave emission by loops. We estimate the reach of future interferometers LISA, BBO, DECIGO, ET and CE and radio telescope SKA to probe the new physics energy scale at which the universe has experienced changes in its expansion history. We find that a given interferometer may be sensitive to very different energy scales, depending on the nature and duration of the non-standard era, and the value of the string tension. It is fascinating that by exploiting the data from different GW observatories associated with distinct frequency bands, we may be able to reconstruct the full spectrum and therefore extract the values of fundamental physics parameters.

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Gravitational wave bursts from cosmic string cusps and pseudocusps

Cited by 12 publications

References 55 publications

Primordial black holes from cusp collapse on cosmic strings

Primordial black holes from cusp collapse on cosmic strings

Stochastic gravitational wave background from smoothed cosmic string loops

Beyond the Standard Models with cosmic strings

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