CLASSICAL DYNAMICS OF MACROSCOPIC STRINGS

In recent work, Dabholkar et al. constructed static ''cosmic string'' solutions of the low-energy supergravity equations of the heterotic string, and conjectured that these solitons are actually exterior solutions for infinitely-long fundamental strings. In this paper we provide compelling dynamical evidence to support this conjecture by computing the dynamical force exerted by a solitonic string on an identical test-string limit, the Veneziano amplitude for the scattering of macroscopic winding states and the metric on moduli space for the scattering of two string solitons. All three methods yield trivial scattering in the low-energy limit.