Cosmic String Loops Collapsing to Black Holes

We examine the question of collapse of Turok's two-parameter family of cosmic strings. We first perform a classification of the strings according to the specific time(s) at which the minimal string size is reached during one period. We then obtain an exact analytical expression for the probability of collapse to black holes for the Turok strings. Our result has the same general behavior as previously obtained in the literature but we find, in addition, a numerical prefactor that changes the result by three orders of magnitude. Finally we show that our careful computation of the prefactor helps us to understand the discrepancy between previously obtained results and, in particular, that for "large" values of Gμ, there may not even be a discrepancy. We also give a simple physical argument that can immediately rule out some of the previously obtained results.