Extended defects in curved spacetimes

This Thesis is concerned with three particular aspects of extended cosmic strings and domain walls in cosmology: their dynamics, gravitation and interaction with a black hole. In Chapter 3, we study the dynamics of an abelian-Higgs cosmic string. We find its equations of motion from an effective action and compare, for three test trajectories, the resulting motion with that observed in the Nambu-Goto approximation. We also present a general argument showing that the corrected motion of any string is generically antirigid. We pursue the investigation of the dynamics of topological defects in Chapter 5, where we find (from integrability conditions rather than an effective action) the effective equations governing the motion of a gravitating curved domain wall. In Chapter 4 we investigate the spacetime of a gravitating domain wall in a theory with a general potential V(Φ). We show that, depending on the gravitational coupling c of the scalar 4), all nontrivial solutions fall into two categories interpretable as describing respectively domain wall and false vacuum-de Sitter solutions. Wall solutions cannot exist beyond a value 4/3εmax, and vacuum-de Sitter solutions are unstable to decaying into wall solutions below εmax; at εmax we observe a phase transition between the two types of solution. We finally specialize for the Goldstone and sine-Gordon potentials. In Chapter 6 we consider a Nielsen-Olesen vortex whose axis passes through the centre of an extremal Reissner-Nordstroem black hole. We examine in particular the existence of piercing and expelled solutions (where the string respectively does and does not penetrate the black hole's horizon) and determine that while thin strings penetrate the horizon - and therefore can be genuinely called hair - thick strings are expelled; the two kinds of solution are separated by a phase transition. (author)