Large scale CMB anomalies from thawing cosmic strings
- Centre for Cosmology, Particle Physics and Phenomenology, Institute of Mathematics and Physics, Louvain University, 2 Chemin du Cyclotron, 1348 Louvain-la-Neuve (Belgium)
- Research Center for the Early Universe (RESCEU), Graduate School of Science, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo 113-0033 (Japan)
Cosmic strings formed during inflation are expected to be either diluted over super-Hubble distances, i.e., invisible today, or to have crossed our past light cone very recently. We discuss the latter situation in which a few strings imprint their signature in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) Anisotropies after recombination. Being almost frozen in the Hubble flow, these strings are quasi static and evade almost all of the previously derived constraints on their tension while being able to source large scale anisotropies in the CMB sky. Using a local variance estimator on thousand of numerically simulated Nambu-Goto all sky maps, we compute the expected signal and show that it can mimic a dipole modulation at large angular scales while being negligible at small angles. Interestingly, such a scenario generically produces one cold spot from the thawing of a cosmic string loop. Mixed with anisotropies of inflationary origin, we find that a few strings of tension GU = O(1) × 10{sup −6} match the amplitude of the dipole modulation reported in the Planck satellite measurements and could be at the origin of other large scale anomalies.
- OSTI ID:
- 22525006
- Journal Information:
- Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, Journal Name: Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics Journal Issue: 02 Vol. 2016; ISSN 1475-7516
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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