Quantization of Cosmic Strings

Question

I know there is a lot of work (recently as well) on quantum fields in the vicinity of cosmic strings. Basically, working out what can happen to matter fields in conical metrics. There has also been some work on pairs of cosmic strings, getting Casimir-like effects.

My question is more about the actual quantization of cosmic strings. They are naturally classical objects, with the energy scale (tension) set by the symmetry breaking scale. But I'm curious about small-scale behavior - what if I wanted to know about the extreme local behavior of a cosmic string, say how it interacts with another string or scattering with matter fields. Naively, I would expect if you tried to quantize the string itself you would get all the usual open-string-like modes from String theory, 26 dimensions, etc, but could there be quantum excitations on such a string? Is there any work in this area, or is the scale of these objects such that the question is a bit nonsensical?

Comments

Lubos Motl has given a general answer to this question here: http://motls.blogspot.in/2013/08/discussion-on-old-and-new-theoretical.html?m=1#comment-1320255110; I hope he agrees to post the answer here too.