COSMIC DEFECTS AND CMB ANISOTROPY

Abstract

Recent measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies by BOOMERANG and MAXIMA collaborations have tightened the observational constraints on theories of structure formation. They disagree with the predictions of conventional topological defect models. Considering the fact that topological defects are predicted by the majority of realistic particle physics models, the exact nature of the constraints imposed by the recent data on the population and the properties of the defects must be fully understood. We show that the predictions of current cosmic string models can be brought into a closer agreement with the observations by choosing a closed universe with Ω = 1.3 and by including the effects of the small-scale structure and radiation products of the strings. These alone, however, are not sufficient for obtaining a good fit to the measured shape of the angular power spectrum. To fit the data cosmic strings would either have to be correlated on large (perhaps superhorizon) scales or would have to possess a higher degree of coherence, i.e. be more "time-correlated".