COSMIC STRING DECAY

Abstract
We calculate the rate of decay of cosmic string loops into fermions and bosons, at zero and non-zero temperatures, taking the back reaction of the string on itself into account. The decay rate is controlled by the radius of curvature of the string. We find that with the exception of decays into massless scalar fields at high temperatures, the decay rate is completely negligible for cosmologically interesting string loops, when compared to gravitational energy loss.

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