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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 February 2009
By erecting a co-ordinate system tailored to the geometry of a cosmic string and examining the properties of the near gravitational field, it is possible to distinguish two types of gravitational waves supported by a general string metric. The first type, travelling waves, are completely decoupled from the curvature of the world sheet, whereas the second type, which I choose to call curvature waves, are generated in response to any non-trivial geometric structure on the string.