Brane dynamics for treatment of cosmic strings and vortons

This course provides a self contained introduction to the general theory of relativistic brane models, of the category that includes point particle, string, and membrane representations for phenomena that can be considered as being confined to a worldsheet of the corresponding dimension (respectively one, two, and three) in a thin limit approximation. The first part of the course is concerned with purely kinematic aspects: it is shown how, to second differential order, the geometry (and in particular the inner and outer curvature) of a brane worldsheet of arbitrary dimension is describable in terms of the first, second, and third fundamental tensor; the extension to a foliation by a congruence of such worldsheets is also briefly discussed. In the next part, it is shown how -- to lowest order in the thin limit -- the evolution of such a brane worldsheet will always be governed by a simple tensorial equation of motion whose left hand side is the contraction of the second fundamental tensor with the relevant surface stress tensor, while the right hand side will simply vanish in the case of free motion and will otherwise be just the orthogonal projection of any external force density that may happen to act on the brane. (Allowance for first order deviations from such a thin limit treatment would require evolution equations of a more complicated kind of which a prototype example is presented.) The last part of the course concentrates on the case of a string, and particularly on the stationary (centrifugally supported) configurations known as vortons, which, if they are sufficiently stable, may be of considerable cosmological significance.