Recent work suggests that fundamental and Dirichlet strings, and their (p, q) bound states, may be observed as cosmic strings. The evolution of cosmic string networks, and therefore their observational signals, depends on what happens when two strings collide. We study this in string perturbation theory for collisions between all possible pairs of strings; different cases involve sphere, disk, ...

We perform a multiparameter likelihood analysis to compare measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) power spectra with predictions from models involving cosmic strings. Adding strings to the standard case of a primordial spectrum with power-law tilt ns, we find a 2sigma detection of strings: f10=0.11+/-0.05, where f10 is the fractional contribution made by strings in the temperatur...

I report on a critical analysis of the scenario of electroweak baryoge-nesis mediated by nonsuperconducting cosmic strings. This mechanism relies upon electroweak symmetry restoration in a region around cosmic strings, where sphalerons would be unsuppressed. I discuss the various problems this scenario has to face, presenting a careful computation of the sphaleron rates inside the strings, of t...

Cosmic strings in the brane Universe have recently gained a great interest. I think the most interesting story is that future cosmological observations distinguish them from the conventional cosmic strings. If the strings are the higher-dimensional objects that can (at least initially) move along the compactified space, and finally settle down to (quasi-)degenerated vacua in the compactified sp...

The propagation of cosmic rays through the interstellar medium (ISM) inevitably produces LiBeB nuclei, and the accumulation of these elements over lifetime of galaxy can broadly account for the solar LiBeB abundances. Furthermore, data in old (Population II) stars provides crucial new information: the LiBeB trend versus heavy element abundances traces the Galactic evolution of LiBeB. We summari...

Scaling networks of cosmic defects, such as strings and textures, actively generate scalar, vector, and tensor metric perturbations throughout the history of the Universe. In particular, vector modes sourced by defects are an efficient source of the cosmic microwave background B-mode polarization. We use the recently released BICEP2 and POLARBEAR B-mode polarization spectra to constrain propert...

We report first results of first global galactic-scale CR-MHD simulations of cosmicray-driven dynamo. We investigate the dynamics of magnetized interstellar medium (ISM), which is dynamically coupled with the cosmic-ray (CR) gas. We assume that exploding stars deposit small-scale, randomly oriented, dipolar magnetic fields into the differentially rotating ISM, together with a portion of cosmic ...

The early Universe might have undergone phase transitions at energy scales much higher than the one corresponding to the Grand Unified Theories (GUT) scales. Then, at these higher energy scales, the transition at which gravity separated from all other interactions, the Planck era, more massive strings called supermassive cosmic strings, could be produced, with energy of about 10GeV . The dynami...

Aims. We present a parameter study of the magnetohydrodynamical dynamo driven by cosmic rays in the interstellar medium (ISM) focusing on the efficiency of magnetic field amplification and the issue of energy equipartition between magnetic, kinetic and cosmic