Cosmic string lens phenomenology: Model of Poisson energy distribution - art. no. 023005

We present a novel approach for investigating lens phenomenology of cosmic strings in order to elaborate detection strategies in galaxy deep field ima ges. To account for the complexity of the projected energy distribution of string networks we assume their lens effects to be similar to those of a st raight string carrying a random energy distribution. In such a model we sho w that, unlike the case of uniform strings, critical phenomena naturally ap pear. We explore the properties of the critical lines and caustics. In part icular; assuming that the energy coherence length along the string is much smaller than the observation scale, we succeed in computing the total lengt h of critical lines per unit string length and find it to be 4/root 3E(3/4) . The length of the associated caustic lines can also be computed to be 16/ (pi root3)E(3/4). The picture we obtain here for the phenomenology of cosmi c string,detection is clearly at variance with common lore.