Limits on cosmic chiral vortons

C. J. A. P. Martins, E. P. S. Shellard

Abstract
We study chiral vorton production for Witten-type superconducting string models in the context of a recently developed analytic formalism. We delineate three distinct scenarios: First, a low energy regime (including the electroweak scale) where vortons can be a source of dark matter. Secondly, an intermediate energy regime where the vorton density is too high to be compatible with the standard cosmology (thereby excluding these models). Finally, a high energy regime (including the GUT scale) in which no vortons are expected to form. The vorton density is most sensitive to the order of the string-forming phase transition and relatively insensitive to the current-forming transition. For a second-order string transition, vorton production is cosmologically disastrous for the range 10⁻²⁸ ≲ Gμ ≲ 10⁻¹⁰ (10⁵ GeV ≲ T_c ≲ 10¹⁴ GeV), while for the first-order case we can only exclude 10⁻²⁰ ≲ Gμ ≲ 10⁻¹⁴ (10⁹ GeV ≲ T_c ≲ 10¹² GeV). We provide a fitting formula which summarises our results.

Physics Letters B
Volume 445, Page 43
December 1998

ADS Bibliographic code: 1998PhLB..445...43M