Supermassive cosmic string compactifications

The space-time dimensions transverse to a static straight cosmic string with a sufficiently large tension (supermassive cosmic strings) are compact and typically have a singularity at a finite distance form the core. In this paper, we discuss how the presence of multiple supermassive cosmic strings in the 4d Abelian-Higgs model can induce the spontaneous compactification of the transverse space and explicitly construct solutions where the gravitational background becomes regular everywhere. We discuss the embedding of this model in N = 1 supergravity and show that some of these solutions are half-BPS, in the sense that they leave unbroken half of the supersymmetries of the model.