Description
I will review the gravitational-wave (GW) phenomenology of various types of cosmic strings, including stable, metastable, and current-carrying strings, and discuss the capacity of cosmic strings to explain the evidence for a GW background in the latest pulsar timing array (PTA) data sets. In doing so, I will emphasize current uncertainties in the modeling of the GW signal from cosmic strings and how they impact the interpretation of the PTA data. Along the way, I will also mention recent results on low-scale strings (see 2405.10937 and 2505.04537) and present a fully analytical treatment of the GW spectrum from stable strings in the velocity-dependent one-scale (VOS) model (see 2412.20907).
