High Energy Neutrinos, Photons and Cosmic Rays from Non-Scaling Cosmic Strings

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Abstract
Decaying topological defects, in particular cosmic strings, can produce a significant flux of high energy neutrinos, photons and cosmic rays. According to the prevailing understanding of cosmic string dynamics in an expanding Universe, the network of long strings loses its energy first into string loops, which in turn give off most of their energy as gravitational radiation. However, it has recently been suggested by Vincent et al. (VHS) that particle emission may be the dominant energy loss channel for the long string network. In this case, the predicted flux of high energy particles would be much larger. Here we calculate the predicted flux of high energy gamma rays, neutrinos and cosmic ray antiprotons and protons as a function of the scale of symmetry breaking at which the strings are produced and as a function of the initial energy of the particle jets which result from the string decay. Assuming the validity of the VHS scenario, we find that an interesting domain of the parameter space of string models is already excluded by current observations. A new aspect of our work is the computation of the secondary muon and electron neutrinos fluxes resulting from muon decay in the particle jets.

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