  The interaction of defects can lead to a phenomenon of erasure. During this
process, a lower-dimensional object gets absorbed and dissolved by a
higher-dimensional one. The phenomenon is very general and has a wide range of
implications, both cosmological and fundamental. In particular, all types of
strings, such as cosmic strings, QCD flux tubes, or fundamental strings, get
erased when encountering a defect, either solitonic or a $D$-brane that
deconfines their fluxes. This leads to a novel mechanism of cosmic string
break-up, accompanied by gravitational and electromagnetic radiations. The
arguments based on loss of coherence and the entropy count suggest that the
erasure probability is very close to one, and strings never make it through the
deconfining layer. We confirm this by a numerical simulation of the system,
which effectively captures the essence of the phenomenon: a $2+1$-dimensional
problem of interaction between a Nielsen-Olesen vortex of a $U(1)$ Higgs model
and a domain wall inside which the $U(1)$ gauge group is unHiggsed and the
magnetic flux is deconfined. In accordance with the entropy argument, in our
simulation, the vortex never makes it across the wall.
