The wiggly cosmic string as a waveguide for massless and massive fields

TL;DR

This paper explores how wiggly cosmic strings can act as gravitational waveguides for scalar fields, revealing analogies with quantum systems and optical fibers, and proposing laboratory simulations.

Contribution

It demonstrates the wave equation near a wiggly string is equivalent to the 2D hydrogen atom, and models the string as a gravitational waveguide with tunable modes.

Findings

Wave modes depend on mass, energy density, and tension.

Analogies with quantum hydrogen atom and optical fibers.

Proposal for laboratory simulation of cosmic string effects.

Abstract

We examine the effect of a wiggly cosmic string for both massless and massive particle propagation along the string axis. We show that the wave equation that governs the propagation of a scalar field in the neighborhood of a wiggly string is formally equivalent to the quantum wave equation describing the hydrogen atom in two dimensions. We further show that the wiggly string spacetime behaves as a gravitational waveguide in which the quantized wave modes propagate with frequencies that depend on the mass, string energy density, and string tension. We propose an analogy with an optical fiber, defining an effective refractive index likely to mimic the cosmic string effect in the laboratory.