Review Article

Cosmic Strings and Their Induced Non-Gaussianities in the Cosmic Microwave Background

Figure 2

String forming field profiles in the Abelian Higgs model with unity winding number. The Higgs field vanishes in the vortex core and reaches its vacuum expectation value within distances given by the Higgs Compton wavelength . The gauge field condenses inside the vortex over distances given by .