No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

The motivation of this thesis is to look for a signature of Lorentz violation, hopefully observable, in the gravitational waves emitted by cosmic strings. Aspects of cosmic strings are reviewed, in particular how focused bursts of gravitational radiation are emitted when a cusp forms on the string. The same phenomenon is then studied in an effective field theory with Lorentz violation called Einstein-aether theory. This is a simple theory with a dynamic preferred frame, but it retains rotational and diffeomorphism invariance. The linearized version of the theory produces five wave modes. We study the usual transverse traceless modes which now have a wave speed that can be lower or greater than the speed of light. This altered speed produces distinctive features in the waves. They depend on two free parameters: roughly the wave speed and the acceleration of the string cusp. The profile of the wave is analyzed in detail for different values of the parameters and explained by close comparison with the string motion.

The motivation of this thesis is to look for a signature of Lorentz violation, hopefully observable, in the gravitational waves emitted by cosmic strings. Aspects of cosmic strings are reviewed, in particular how focused bursts of gravitational radiation are emitted when a cusp forms on the string. The same phenomenon is then studied in an effective field theory with Lorentz violation called Einstein-aether theory. This is a simple theory with a dynamic preferred frame, but it retains rotational and diffeomorphism invariance. The linearized version of the theory produces five wave modes. We study the usual transverse traceless modes which now have a wave speed that can be lower or greater than the speed of light. This altered speed produces distinctive features in the waves. They depend on two free parameters: roughly the wave speed and the acceleration of the string cusp. The profile of the wave is analyzed in detail for different values of the parameters and explained by close comparison with the string motion.

The motivation of this thesis is to look for a signature of Lorentz violation, hopefully observable, in the gravitational waves emitted by cosmic strings. Aspects of cosmic strings are reviewed, in particular how focused bursts of gravitational radiation are emitted when a cusp forms on the string. The same phenomenon is then studied in an effective field theory with Lorentz violation called Einstein-aether theory. This is a simple theory with a dynamic preferred frame, but it retains rotational and diffeomorphism invariance. The linearized version of the theory produces five wave modes. We study the usual transverse traceless modes which now have a wave speed that can be lower or greater than the speed of light. This altered speed produces distinctive features in the waves. They depend on two free parameters: roughly the wave speed and the acceleration of the string cusp. The profile of the wave is analyzed in detail for different values of the parameters and explained by close comparison with the string motion. / Science, Faculty of / Physics and Astronomy, Department of / Graduate

The existence of cosmic strings was proposed in the mid-seventies as a by-product of the various phase transitions that occured in the early Universe. Cosmic strings are one-dimensional topological defects; structures of extremely high energy density with infinitesimal widths and lengths of cosmological size. After they were proposed, cosmic strings with GUT energy scales became very popular as a potential source for galaxy formation, but after CMB observations ruled out this possibility, they stopped attracting much scientific attention. The whole field was revived as part of superstring theory, where the formation of cosmic (super)string networks is a very common characteristic of brane inflation models, allowing them to acquire energies over a much more extended range. Attempts to detect cosmic strings centers on the three most basic observational signatures they create: CMB anisotropies, gravitational lensing events and the stochastic gravitational wave background they are expected to have created. So far, no detection of cosmic strings has been achieved. Their non-detection has inevitably led to setting constraints on their most important characteristic; their lineal energy density (or tension) which describes their energy scale. The topic of this thesis is how to use pulsar timing arrays (PTAs) in order to set constraints on the string tension. The limits PTAs can set on the amplitude of the stochastic gravitational wave background at ~nHz frequencies can be used to set constraints on the string tension. Such an effort is much more complicated than CMB or gravitational lensing investigations due to the large number of unknown cosmic string model parameters which are involved and for which, not only we do not have any observational evidence for their value, but moreover, they can acquire values over very wide ranges. So far, previous investigations were based on assumptions about these parameters and on the specific gravitational wave emission mechanism from cosmic string loops. In this work we have constructed a new code to reproduce the gravitational wave background from a cosmic string network, based on the widely accepted one scale model. Using this, we have performed numerous simulations to study the effects on the gravitational wave spectrum for each cosmic string model parameter, covering the whole parameter space of interest for each of them. Moreover, we have also extended the application of our code in order to describe cosmic string networks which create loops on more than one scale, models of which have recently appeared in the literature. In particular, we have investigated cosmic string networks which create loops at two distinct scales and loops with scales described by a log-normal distribution After studying the properties of the gravitational wave spectrum from cosmic strings, we combined our simulations with the most stringent limit so far on the stochastic gravitational wave background imposed by the EPTA. This limit is provided as a function of the slope of the gravitational wave background and we have also used this information for the first time to acquire even more accurate results. In our approach, we did not make any assumption about the values of the cosmic string model parameters, investigating all possibilities and we managed to compute a conservative and completely general constraint on the cosmic string tension, G mu<5.3x10 -7, which is slightly weaker than the current constraints set by CMB and gravitational lensing. We concluded our work by estimating the projected constraints that are expected to be achieved by near future experiments like LEAP, and ultimately by the SKA, to find an improvement of at least two orders of magnitude, significantly outperforming the expected constraints by future CMB investigations.

abstract: In this dissertation, I present the results from my recent investigations into the interactions involving topological defects, such as magnetic monopoles and strings, that may have been produced in the early universe. I performed numerical studies on the interactions of twisted monopole-antimonopole pairs in the 't Hooft-Polyakov model for a range of values of the scalar to vector mass ratio. Sphaleron solution predicted by Taubes was recovered, and I mapped out its energy and size as functions of parameters. I also looked into the production, and decay modes of $U(1)$ gauge and global strings. I demonstrated that strings can be produced upon evolution of gauge wavepackets defined within a certain region of parameter space. The numerical exploration of the decay modes of cosmic string loops led to the conclusions that string loops emit particle radiation primarily due to kink collisions, and that their decay time due to these losses is proportional to $L^p$, where $L$ is the loop length and $p \approx 2$. In contrast, the decay time due to gravitational radiation scales in proportion to $L$, and I concluded that particle emission is the primary energy loss mechanism for loops smaller than a critical length scale, while gravitational losses dominate for larger loops. In addition, I analyzed the decay of cosmic global string loops due to radiation of Goldstone bosons and massive scalar ($\chi$) particles. The length of loops I studied ranges from 200-1000 times the width of the string core. I found that the lifetime of a loop is approximately $1.4L$. The energy spectrum of Goldstone boson radiation has a $k^{-1}$ fall off, where $k$ is the wavenumber, and a sharp peak at $k\approx m_\chi/2$, where $m_\chi$ is the mass of $\chi$. The latter is a new feature and implies a peak at high energies (MeV-GeV) in the cosmological distribution of QCD axions. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Physics 2020