On the nature of cosmic strings in the brane world

Abstract

We investigate a static, cylindrically symmetric cosmic string on the brane without a perturbative approximation. We find there could be a (large) enhancement of the (effective) string tension when the energy density at the center of the string is (much) larger than twice the brane tension. We also point out a new way to evade the cosmic string problem when the energy density at the center of the string approaches twice the brane tension. These findings could have experimental and theoretical implications for searching for cosmic strings on the brane, in particular for cosmic strings generated after inflation (such as D-term inflation) on the brane.