Cosmic strings are an expected consequence of early Universe phase transitions, arising from symmetry breaking patterns. As such, a detection would provide evidence of new physics.
Therefore, the detection of cosmic strings is a primary target for future space-based missions such as CORE or the gravitational wave detector, LISA.
This proposal seeks to go beyond the current state of the art - by exploring the validity of approximations oft-assumed, by quantitatively studying more realistic types of string - thus seeking to answer several long-standing issues.
It is comprised of three goals, all of which are not only interesting to the string community but also for future confrontation with observational data, as its results will directly lead towards a better understanding of the expected signals of string networks.
To summarize, the first goal is aimed to obtain a comparison of field theory simulations of strings with simulations assuming the thin-string approximation, the second involves the study of high-resolution simulations of (arguably) more realistic current-carrying strings, and lastly, a study of Axion dark matter abundance from string networks. These goals require unprecedented resolution at small-scales, only possible with extreme hardware resources.
University of Helsinki, Finland.