Transplanckian censorship and global cosmic strings

Abstract

Large field excursions are required in a number of axion models of inflation. These models also possess global cosmic strings, around which the axion follows a path mirroring the inflationary trajectory. Cosmic strings are thus an interesting theoretical laboratory for the study of transplanckian field excursions. We describe connections be-tween various effective field theory models of axion monodromy and study the classical spacetimes around their supercritical cosmic strings. For small decay constants f < Mp and large winding numbers n > Mp/f , the EFT is under control and the string cores undergo topological inflation, which may be either of exponential or power-law type. We show that th..