Heterotic Cosmic Strings

Becker, Katrin; Becker, Melanie; Krause, Axel

Heterotic Cosmic Strings

Authors

Becker, Katrin

Becker, Melanie

Krause, Axel

Description

We show that all three conditions for the cosmological relevance of heterotic cosmic strings, the right tension, stability and a production mechanism at the end of inflation, can be met in the strongly coupled M-theory regime. Whereas cosmic strings generated from weakly coupled heterotic strings have the well known problems posed by Witten in 1985, we show that strings arising from M5-branes wrapped around 4-cycles (divisors) of a Calabi-Yau in heterotic M-theory compactifications, solve these problems in an elegant fashion.
25 pages, v2: section and references added