Shock waves in superconducting cosmic strings: instability to extrinsic perturbations

Abstract

Superconducting cosmic string may admit shock-like discontinuities of the current when the latter is spacelike ("magnetic" regime), while no shock at timelike current ("electric" regime) was discovered in numerical simulations. We find that the necessary and enough conditions for existence of stable shocks and show that the shock can be unstable in the presence of infinitesimal extrinsic perturbations of the string worldsheet. The shocks in the "magnetic" regime are not vulnerable to this instability but the shocks in the "electric" regime do not survive.