Primordial anisotropies from cosmic strings during inflation

In this work, we study the imprint of an individual primordial cosmic string within a Hubble patch on the inflationary power spectrum. A straight cosmic string induces two distinct contributions to the curvature perturbations power spectrum. The first type of correction respects the translation invariance while violating isotropy. This generates quadrupolar statistical anisotropy in cosmic microwave background maps, which is constrained by the Planck data. The second contribution breaks both homogeneity and isotropy, generating a dipolar power asymmetry in the variance of temperature fluctuations with its amplitude falling on small scales. We show that the strongest constraint on the tension of primordial cosmic strings is obtained from the quadrupolar anisotropy and argue that the mass scale of the underlying theory responsible for the formation of the string cannot be much higher than the grand unified theory scale. The predictions for the diagonal and off-diagonal components of the cosmic microwave background angular power spectrum induced by the string are presented.