The impact of cosmic strings on the gravitational wave signal measured by LIGO and LISA

Cosmic strings are a type of topological defect that can be produced in the early Universe, and are one of the most likely sources of cosmological gravitational waves.

They produce gravitational waves though the presence of cusps and kinks on string loops, giving rise to both a transient signal and a stochastic background. Due to modelling uncertainty in the loops, the precise nature of the expected signal is yet to be determined.

In this project you will study in detail the statistics of string cusps and kinks, and develop a model of the loop population. The current LIGO search technique involves comparing candidate events to a set of templates.

Given the uncertainty in the signal, you will develop model independent methods to search for strings in the LIGO data, and also provide estimates for the LISA experiment.