Speaker
Akifumi Chitose
(ICRR, the University of Tokyo)
Description
Metastable cosmic strings are gathering attention as potential progenitors of stochastic gravitational wave background. They result from a two-step symmetry breaking $G\to H\to 1$ with $\pi_1(H)\ne 0$ and $\pi_1(G)=0$, and decay via internal monopole-antimonopole pair creation. Conventionally, the breaking rate has been estimated by an infinitely thin string approximation, which requires a large hierarchy between the symmetry breaking scales. We numerically constructed a tunneling path and thus obtained a robust lower limit on the tunneling factor $e^{-S}$ even for mild scale hierarchy. In particular, it is relevant to the cosmic string interpretation of the gravitational wave signals recently reported by pulsar timing array experiments.
