Cosmic Strings and Weak Gravitational Lensing

Abstract

We study the deflection of light in the background of a "wiggly" cosmic string, and investigate whether it is possible to detect cosmic strings by means of weak gravitational lensing. For straight strings without small-scale structure there are no signals. In the case of strings with small-scale structure leading to a local gravitational attractive force towards the string, there is a small signal, namely a preferential elliptical distortion of the shape of background galaxies in the direction corresponding to the projection of the string onto the sky. The signal can be statistically distinguished from the signal produced by a linear distribution of black holes by employing an ellipticity axis distribution statistic.