  We provide a thorough exposition, including technical and numerical details,
of previously published results on the quantum stabilization of cosmic strings.
Stabilization occurs through the coupling to a heavy fermion doublet in a
reduced version of the standard model. We combine the vacuum polarization
energy of fermion zero-point fluctuations and the binding energy of occupied
energy levels, which are of the same order in a semi-classical expansion.
Populating these bound states assigns a charge to the string. We show that
strings carrying fermion charge become stable if the electro-weak bosons are
coupled to a fermion that is less than twice as heavy as the top quark. The
vacuum remains stable in our model, because neutral strings are not
energetically favored. These findings suggests that extraordinarily large
fermion masses or unrealistic couplings are not required to bind a cosmic
string in the standard model.
