Number of cosmic string loops

By Jose J. Blanco-Pillado, Ken D. Olum, Benjamin Shlaer. 2013

262 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Using recent simulation results, we provide the mass and speed spectrum of cosmic string loops. This is the quantity of primary interest for many phenomenological signatures of cosmic strings, and it can be accurately predicted using recently acquired detailed knowledge of the loop production function. We emphasize that gravitational smoothing of long strings plays a negligible role in determining the total number of existing loops. We derive a bound on the string tension imposed by recent constraints on the stochastic gravitational wave background from pulsar timing arrays, finding $G\ensuremath{\mu}\ensuremath{\le}2.8\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}{10}^{\ensuremath{-}9}$. We also provide a derivation of the Boltzmann equation for cosmic string loops in the language of differential forms.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cf03837775836101a151aac557ac4f6e0d086872

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

Citations in the corpus

Stochastic gravitational wave background from smoothed cosmic string loops (2017, methodology): “1 [6], so we will make this approximation to compute G1.”
New limits on cosmic strings from gravitational wave observation (2017, background): “Most importantly, it is not correct to compute the loop density by applying energy conservation to the long string network, because the great majority of the energy appears as the kinetic energy of small, rapidly moving loops, which contribute little to the gravitational spectrum [15].”
The NANOGrav 11 Year Data Set: Pulsar-timing Constraints on the Stochastic Gravitational-wave Background (2018, methodology): “Finally, even though the most recent EPTA constraints on cosmic strings (Lentati et al. 2015) were not computed under the assumptions of the Blanco-Pillado et al. (2014) simulations, in NG9b the constraints were converted to get a corresponding limit on the string tension of Gµ/c2 < 8.6× 10−10.”
European Pulsar Timing Array Limits On An Isotropic Stochastic Gravitational-Wave Background (2015, background): “The tension constraint that was obtained based on that loop number density and the previous EPTA GWB limit was Gμ/c2 < 2.8 × 10−9 (Blanco-Pillado et al. 2014).”