  We provide a thorough exposition of recent 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. The study
combines 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. Strings carrying fermion charge become stable if the Higgs and gauge
fields are coupled to a fermion that is less than twice as heavy as the top
quark. The vacuum remains stable in the model, because neutral strings are not
energetically favored. These findings suggest that extraordinarily large
fermion masses or unrealistic couplings are not required to bind a cosmic
string in the standard model.
