Decay of Cosmic String Loops due to Particle Radiation.

Constraints on the tension and the abundance of cosmic strings depend crucially on the rate at which they decay into particles and gravitational radiation. We study the decay of cosmic string loops in the Abelian-Higgs model by performing field theory simulations of loop formation and evolution. We find that our set of string loops emits particle radiation primarily due to kink collisions, and that the decay time due to these losses is proportional to L^{p} with p≈2 where L is the loop length.