Dilatonic global strings

Abstract

We examine the field equations of a self-gravitating global string in low energy superstring gravity, allowing for an arbitrary coupling of the global string to the dilaton. Massive and massless dilatons are considered. For the massive dilaton the spacetime is similar to the recently discovered non-singular time-dependent Einstein self-gravitating global string, but the massless dilaton generically gives a singular spacetime, even allowing for time dependence. We also demonstrate a time-dependent non-singular string-antistring configuration, in which the string pair causes a compactification of two of the spatial dimensions, albeit on a very large scale.