134. Cosmic strings – simple and nice introduction into the topic

After my recent post on textures I have been asked what could a newcomer to the field read about topological defects in cosmology apart from the canonical book by Vilenkin and Shellard that I’ve recommended?

Occasionally, a very good introduction level review of cosmic strings has recently appeared in Archives – the paper by A. Achucarro and C. Martins which is going to be a part of forthcoming Encyclopedia of Complexity and Systems Science.

The review contains everything what a beginner (even an undergraduate student) may need to understand the subject in the first approximation:

1. lightning fast introduction into FRW cosmology
2. discussion of topological defects in the abelian Higgs model
3. Kibble mechanism of cosmic string formation. They even mention that the Kibble-Zurek scenario of string formation in the second order phase transition was confirmed in experiments on a rotating cryostat in the Helsinki Institute of Technology; curiously, the Institute is actually located not in Helsinki, but in Espoo, where I live I once visited the lab to give an introductionary talk on cosmology and saw those rotating cryostats by my own eyes One nice shining piece of technology, I should say
4. Dynamics of the Nambu-Goto string
5. Velocity-dependent one-scale model and scaling analysis of its solutions
6. Consequences of cosmic strings for astrophysics and cosmology, in particular, nice explanation how cosmic strings should affect CMB
7. Cosmic superstrings

In conclusion, I would like to say to a curious beginner – the subject is very interesting, and tons of info about cosmic strings are now accessible,  but chances (apart from condensed matter applications, of course, but there strings are not so cosmic and relativistic ) that you will see a cosmic string  in your life time are rather small: current bounds from CMB show that there is no more than a single cosmic string per Hubble patch.