HEP Theory Journal Club

Early Structure Formation from Cosmic String Loops in Light of Early JWST Data

Hao Jiao

McGill

JWST revealed a number of high-redshift galaxy candidates with unexpectedly high stellar masses recently, which are in tension with the standard Gaussian ΛCDM model. Cosmic strings, if they exist, sourcing nonlinear and non-Gaussian perturbations all the way back to the time of equal matter and radiation (and earlier), are able to solve this tension. Here we compute the cumulative stellar mass function of galaxies seeded by a scaling distribution of cosmic string loops and find that strings with a value of Gµ ∼ 10⁻⁸ can explain the preliminary JWST data. Besides, we compare the PDF of the heaviest loop-seeded galaxies with the extremal ones detected by JWST using Extreme Value Statistics.