[IPTA-cs] Cosmic string journal club

[Kai Schmitz <kai schmitz cern ch>]

Dear All,

I posted this paper already on Slack, but let me also share it here:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.13125

Any thoughts / comments?

Here are my two cents: Yesterday we were saying that we might want to 
look into several "more exotic" alternatives to bread and butter stable 
cosmic strings. One alternative is metastable cosmic strings; another 
one might be cosmic superstrings. In the latter case, we could either 
just rescale Omega_GW by a factor 1/P ... or we follow the prescription 
in this paper here, which treats the effect of a suppressed 
intercommutation probability (if I understand correctly) a bit more 
carefully. The authors especially incorporate the intercommutation 
probability P < 1 in the differential equations of the VOS model, which 
means that it would be straightforward to reproduce their analysis in my 
code. I would only need to change a few lines of code. Alternatively, I 
could just ask one the authors, Masaki Yamada, to send me some of his 
numerical data. Masaki is a friend and collaborator of mine. I am sure 
he would be more than happy to share some of his GW spectra with us.

TL;DR: Regarding cosmic superstrings we basically have three options:

1) Do not include them in our analysis

2) Simply rescale Omega_GW by 1/P

3) Reproduce the analysis in 2204.13125 or ask Masaki to send us some 
spectra

Best regards, Kai.