Large scale CMB anomalies from thawing cosmic strings
  Cosmic strings formed during inflation are expected to be either diluted over
super-Hubble distances, i.e., invisible today, or to have crossed our past
light cone very recently. We discuss the latter situation in which a few
strings imprint their signature in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB)
Anisotropies after recombination. Being almost frozen in the Hubble flow, these
strings are quasi static and evade almost all of the previously derived
constraints on their tension while being able to source large scale
anisotropies in the CMB sky. Using a local variance estimator on thousand of
numerically simulated Nambu-Goto all sky maps, we compute the expected signal
and show that it can mimic a dipole modulation at large angular scales while
being negligible at small angles. Interestingly, such a scenario generically
produces one cold spot from the thawing of a cosmic string loop. Mixed with
anisotropies of inflationary origin, we find that a few strings of tension GU =
O(1) x 10^(-6) match the amplitude of the dipole modulation reported in the
Planck satellite measurements and could be at the origin of other large scale
anomalies.
