Effects of friction on cosmic strings

Abstract

We study the evolution of cosmic strings taking into account the frictional force due to the surrounding radiation. We consider small perturbations on straight strings, oscillation of circular loops, and small perturbations on circular loops. For straight strings, friction exponentially suppresses perturbations whose comoving scale crosses the horizon before the cosmological time ${t}_{*}\ensuremath{\sim}{\ensuremath{\mu}}^{\ensuremath{-}2}$ (in Planck units), where $\ensuremath{\mu}$ is the string tension. Loops with a size much smaller than ${t}_{*}$ will be approximately circular at the time when they start the relativistic collapse. We investigate the possibility that such loops will form black holes. We find that the number of black holes which are formed through this process is well below present observational limits, so this does not give any lower or upper bounds on $\ensuremath{\mu}$. We also consider the case of straight strings attached to walls and circular holes that can spontaneously nucleate on metastable domain walls.