Gravitational wave bursts from cusps and kinks on cosmic strings

By T. Damour, A. Vilenkin. 2001

326 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The strong beams of high-frequency gravitational waves (GW) emitted by cusps and kinks of cosmic strings are studied in detail. As a consequence of these beams, the stochastic ensemble of GW's generated by a cosmological network of oscillating loops is strongly non Gaussian, and includes occasional sharp bursts that stand above the ``confusion'' GW noise made of many smaller overlapping bursts. Even if only 10% of all string loops have cusps these bursts might be detectable by the planned GW detectors LIGO/VIRGO and LISA for string tensions as small as $G \mu \sim 10^{-13}$. In the implausible case where the average cusp number per loop oscillation is extremely small, the smaller bursts emitted by the ubiquitous kinks will be detectable by LISA for string tensions as small as $G \mu \sim 10^{-12}$. We show that the strongly non Gaussian nature of the stochastic GW's generated by strings modifies the usual derivation of constraints on $G \mu$ from pulsar timing experiments. In particular the usually considered ``rms GW background'' is, when $G \mu \gaq 10^{-7}$, an overestimate of the more relevant confusion GW noise because it includes rare, intense bursts. The consideration of the confusion GW noise suggests that a Grand Unified Theory (GUT) value $ G \mu \sim 10^{-6}$ is compatible with existing pulsar data, and that a modest improvement in pulsar timing accuracy could detect the confusion noise coming from a network of cuspy string loops down to $ G \mu \sim 10^{-11}$. The GW bursts discussed here might be accompanied by Gamma Ray Bursts.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0369a13a08d4905561f2678f1e25145b501dc5d7

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Citations in the corpus

Reconstructing the spectral shape of a stochastic gravitational wave background with LISA (2019, background): “a kination dominated phase [46–50], non-perturbative particle production phenomena [51–62], oscillon dynamics [63–67], strong first order phase transitions [68–81], or cosmic defect networks [82–93].”
Probing the gravitational wave background from cosmic strings with LISA (2019, methodology): “As mentioned above, cusps and kinks radiate non-isotropically meaning that the above waveform is only valid for directions near the cusp or kink direction, and it should be cutoff on angles larger than [50, 51]”
Physics, Astrophysics and Cosmology with Gravitational Waves (2009, background): “Defects that arise from symmetry breaking as the presumed early unified interactions separate from one another can lead to cosmic strings [379], which can produce both a continuous observable gravitational wave background [102] and characteristic isolated bursts of gravitational waves [140, 141, 142”
Baryogenesis from the weak scale to the grand unification scale (2020, background): “…network can form after the spontaneous breaking of a U(1) symmetry (Hindmarsh, 2011), and the resulting GW spectrum has been evaluated for Abelian Higgs strings (Figueroa et al., 2013, 2020) as well as Nambu Goto strings (Damour and Vilenkin, 2001; Siemens et al., 2007; Kuroyanagi et al., 2012).”
Cosmic string production towards the end of brane inflation (2002, unknown): “This scenario is studied by Damour and Vilenkin [18].”
SEVEN-YEAR WILKINSON MICROWAVE ANISOTROPY PROBE (WMAP) OBSERVATIONS: COSMOLOGICAL INTERPRETATION (2010, background): “Adiabatic conditions might be expected if the gravitational waves were generated by the appearance of cusps in cosmic strings (Damour & Vilenkin 2000, 2001; Siemens et al. 2006).”
Monodromy in the CMB: Gravity Waves and String Inflation (2008, methodology): “Similar comments apply to other corners of field theory and string theory with predictive inflationary signatures such as [27, 38, 39 , 40].”
Challenges and opportunities of gravitational-wave searches at MHz to GHz frequencies (2020, background): “All loops are typically expected to contain cusps and kinks, both of which generate GW bursts [211, 212].”
Beyond the Standard Models with cosmic strings (2019, background): “ kink-kink collisions (9) where the spectral index n= 4=3 when the small-scale structure is dominated by cusps [28,36,111], n= 5=3 for kink domination [36], or n= 2 for kink-kink collision domination [109,110]. Therefore, immediately after a loop gets created, at time t iwith a length t i, its lengt”
Stochastic gravitational wave background from smoothed cosmic string loops (2017, background): “Thus rare bursts should be excluded from the background calculation [37].”