A vorton gun Original Research Article

In about half of all near-cusp events in superconducting cosmic strings with chiral currents (and probably with general currents as well), the string intersects itself near the cusp. Intercommutation causes the conversion of the string near the cusp into a vorton (in the chiral case) with very high Lorentz boost. We demonstrate how to analyze the cusp shape in a Lorentz frame that makes the motion simple, by the use of a 5-dimensional procedure, and analyze the resulting production of vortons.