Re: [IPTA-cs] Cosmic string journal club

[Ken Olum <kdo cosmos phy tufts edu>]

Hi, Kai.  It's great that you know Masaki.  I know him also because he
was a postdoc here for a while.

I did not look closely at his "extended VOS" calculations.  His final
conclusion seems to be that the density is proportional to 1/P.  I would
have called this the standard wisdom, but he says the standard wisdom is
P^(-2/3).  Are his eventual extended VOS results the same as just
multiplying by 1/P, or is there some additional subtlety?

My opinion (to which Masaki did not object) is that we don't realy know
very much about low-P networks.  I think eventually we should simulate
them, but it's computationally difficult.  So I always use 1/P, not
because I think it is correct, but because it is the simplest thing to
do when we don't really know what would be correct.

It would be OK with me to also discuss P^(-2/3), which differs only in
mapping one P to another with the same spectrum.  We can also discuss
Masaki's result if it is different from either of these.

                                        Ken