Constraints on Cosmic Strings from the Curl-Mode CMB Lensing Power Spectrum measured by ACT DR6

A network of cosmic strings is one of the few well-motivated cosmological sources of vector and tensor metric perturbations on the largest observable scales. Such perturbations imprint a characteristic curl component in the deflection angle of cosmic microwave background (CMB) photons that, unlike the scalar lensing potential, vanishes for adiabatic density fluctuations at linear order. We exploit the curl-mode lensing reconstruction released as part of the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) Data Release 6 (DR6), based on five seasons of temperature and polarization data covering 9400 deg squared of sky, to set new constraints on the dimensionless string tension G mu and the inter-commutation (reconnection) probability P. Modelling the string-induced curl power spectrum within the velocity-dependent one-scale framework, we obtain a 2 sigma upper bound on the combination G mu P-1 3.5 times 10-5 in the small- P regime, and G mu 5.0 times 10-5 at 2 sigma assuming the canonical Nambu-Goto value P=1. Combining the ACT DR6 curl bandpowers with the Planck 2013 curl-mode reconstruction, which extends down to L min=2, tightens these bounds to G mu P-1 3.2 times 10-5 and G mu 4.3 times 10-5 (2 sigma). These represent the tightest constraints on cosmic strings derived from the curl-mode CMB lensing power spectrum to date. Using the ACT data alone, compared to the ACT 2008-season analysis, the ACT DR6 constraint on G mu P-1 is nearly an order of magnitude tighter.