N=1 supersymmetric cosmic strings

We investigate the microphysics of supersymmetric cosmic strings. In particular we focus on the vortices admitted by N = 1 supersymmetric abelian Higgs models. We give the vortex solutions and demonstrate that the two simplest supersymmetric cosmic string models admit fermionic superconductivity. Further, by using supersymmetry transformations, we show how to solve for the fermion zero-modes giving rise to string superconductivity in terms of the background string fields. We note that this constrains all supersymmetric grand unified theories with abelian strings. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science B.V.