Gravitational-Wave Stochastic Background from Kinks and Cusps on Cosmic Strings

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the gravitational wave background generated by kinks and cusps on cosmic strings, highlighting their comparable contributions and the detectability prospects with current and future gravitational wave observatories.

Contribution

It provides a detailed computation of the gravitational wave background from kinks on cosmic strings and compares their detectability to that of cusps and other cosmological constraints.

Findings

Kinks contribute similarly to cusps in the gravitational wave background.

Current gravitational wave detectors can probe unique parameter spaces of cosmic string models.

The total gravitational wave background from kinks and cusps is within the sensitivity of existing and planned detectors.

Abstract

We compute the contribution of kinks on cosmic string loops to stochastic background of gravitational waves (SBGW).We find that kinks contribute at the same order as cusps to the SBGW.We discuss the accessibility of the total background due to kinks as well as cusps to current and planned gravitational wave detectors, as well as to the big bang nucleosynthesis (BBN), the cosmic microwave background (CMB), and pulsar timing constraints. As in the case of cusps, we find that current data from interferometric gravitational wave detectors, such as LIGO, are sensitive to areas of parameter space of cosmic string models complementary to those accessible to pulsar, BBN, and CMB bounds.