High-resolution simulations of cosmic-string evolution. i. Network evolution

We unveil a new cosmic-string evolution code which evolves the string very accurately down to the very small scales (quite close to the separation of our grid points). We argue that high resolution is necessary in order to understand even the large-scale evolution of the string network and we present the results of a careful and comprehensive study of the large-scale evolution of the string network. This comprehensive study includes a large number of numerical tests which guarantees that our results are indeed physical. Finally, our numerical results are compared to an analytic model introduced by Kibble.