Benjamin Shlaer

Gravitational waves from broken cosmic strings: The bursts and the beads

We analyze the gravitational wave signatures of a network of metastable cosmic strings. We consider the case of cosmic string instability to breakage, with no primordial population of monopoles. This scenario is well motivated from grand unified theories and string-theoretic models with an inflationary phase below the grand unified theories/string scale. The network initially evolves according to a scaling solution, but with breakage events resulting from confined monopoles (beads) being pair produced and accelerated apart. We find these ultrarelativistic beads to be a potent source of gravitational wave bursts, detectable by initial LIGO, advanced LIGO, and LISA. Indeed, advanced LIGO could observe bursts from strings with tensions as low as

Early structure formation from cosmic string loops

G\ensuremath{\mu}\ensuremath{\sim}{10}^{\ensuremath{-}12}

Bubbles of Nothing in Flux Compactifications

. In addition, we find that ultrarelativistic beads produce a scale-invariant stochastic background detectable by LIGO, LISA, and pulsar timing experiments. The stochastic background is scale invariant up to the Planckian frequencies. This phenomenology provides new constraints and signatures of cosmic strings that disappear long before the present day.

Efficient numerical solution to vacuum decay with many fields

We examine the effects of cosmic strings on structure formation and on the ionization history of the universe. While Gaussian perturbations from inflation are known to provide the dominant contribution to the large scale structure of the universe, density perturbations due to strings are highly non-Gaussian and can produce nonlinear structures at very early times. This could lead to early star formation and reionization of the universe. We improve on earlier studies of these effects by accounting for high loop velocities and for the filamentary shape of the resulting halos. We find that for string energy scales Gμ10−7, the effect of strings on the CMB temperature and polarization power spectra can be significant and is likely to be detectable by the Planck satellite. We mention shortcomings of the standard cosmological model of galaxy formation which may be remedied with the addition of cosmic strings, and comment on other possible observational implications of early structure formation by strings.

Decay of flux vacua to nothing

We construct a simple AdS{sub 4}xS{sup 1} flux compactification stabilized by a complex scalar field winding the single extra dimension and demonstrate an instability to nucleation of a bubble of nothing. This occurs when the Kaluza-Klein dimension degenerates to a point, defining the bubble surface. Because the extra dimension is stabilized by a flux, the bubble surface must be charged, in this case under the axionic part of the complex scalar. This smooth geometry can be seen as a de Sitter topological defect with asymptotic behavior identical to the pure compactification. We discuss how a similar construction can be implemented in more general Freund-Rubin compactifications.

Minkowski vacua can be metastable

Finding numerical solutions describing bubble nucleation is notoriously difficult in more than one field space dimension. Traditional shooting methods fail because of the extreme non-linearity of field evolution over a macroscopic distance as a function of initial conditions. Minimization methods tend to become either slow or imprecise for larger numbers of fields due to their dependence on the high dimensionality of discretized function spaces. We present a new method for finding solutions which is both very efficient and able to cope with the non-linearities. Our method directly integrates the equations of motion except at a small number of junction points, so we do not need to introduce a discrete domain for our functions. The method, based on multiple shooting, typically finds solutions involving three fields in around a minute, and can find solutions for eight fields in about an hour. We include a numerical package for Mathematica which implements the method described here.

Bubbles from nothing

We construct instanton solutions describing the decay of flux compactifications of a 6d gauge theory by generalizing the Kaluza-Klein bubble of nothing. The surface of the bubble is described by a smooth magnetically charged solitonic brane whose asymptotic flux is precisely that responsible for stabilizing the 4d compactification. We describe several instances of bubble geometries for the various vacua occurring in a 6d Einstein-Maxwell theory namely, AdS4 × S2, 1,3 × S2, and dS4 × S2. Unlike conventional solutions, the bubbles of nothing introduced here occur where a two-sphere compactification manifold homogeneously degenerates.

Cosmic string loop shapes

We investigate the recent suggestion that a Minkowski vacuum is either absolutely stable, or it has a divergent decay rate and thus fails to have a locally Minkowski description. The divergence comes from boost integration over momenta of the vacuum bubbles. We point out that a prototypical example of false-vacuum decay is pair production in a uniform electric field, so if the argument leading to the divergence is correct, it should apply to this case as well. We provide evidence that no catastrophic vacuum instability occurs in a constant electric field, indicating that the argument cannot be right. Instead, we argue that the boost integration that leads to the divergence is unnecessary: when all possible fluctuations of the vacuum bubble are included, the quantum state of the bubble is invariant under Lorentz boosts.

Large parallel cosmic string simulations: New results on loop production

Within the framework of flux compactifications, we construct an instanton describing the quantum creation of an open universe from nothing. The solution has many features in common with the smooth 6d bubble of nothing solutions discussed recently, where the spacetime is described by a 4d compactification of a 6d Einstein-Maxwell theory on S2 stabilized by flux. The four-dimensional description of this instanton reduces to that of Hawking and Turok. The choice of parameters uniquely determines all future evolution, which we additionally find to be stable against bubble of nothing instabilities.

A new parallel simulation technique

We analyze the shapes of cosmic string loops found in large-scale simulations of an expanding-universe string network. The simulation does not include gravitational back reaction, but we model that process by smoothing the loop using Lorentzian convolution. We find that loops at formation consist of generally straight segments separated by kinks. We do not see cusps or any cusp-like structure at the scale of the entire loop, although we do see very small regions of string that move with large Lorentz boosts. However, smoothing of the string almost always introduces two cusps on each loop. The smoothing process does not lead to any significant fragmentation of loops that were in non-self-intersecting trajectories before smoothing.