Cosmic String Evolution in Brane Inflation

Abstract

There has been notable effort in recent years to obtain inflationary models from string theory. In the most well-studied scenario, brane inflation, the inflationary phase typically ends with a phase transition leading to the production of a network of cosmic (super)strings. These have different properties than ordinary cosmic strings and thus provide a potential probe to the physics of the early universe. In this letter we review recent work on the cosmological evolution of such string networks. Focusing on analytic velocity-dependent evolution models, we discuss the phenomenology of cosmic (super)string networks and obtain constraints for brane-inflation models.