Related papers: Updated Axion CDM energy density
We show that the soft X-ray excess in the Coma cluster can be explained by a cosmic background of relativistic axions converting into photons in the cluster magnetic field. We provide a detailed self-contained review of the cluster soft…
Observations of the cosmological large-scale structure provide well-established neutrino mass limits. We extend this argument to thermal relic axions. We calculate the axion thermal freeze-out temperature and thus their cosmological…
We have reexamine the effect of entropy production on the cosmic axion density and find that the Peccei-Quinn scale $F_a$ larger than about $10^{15}$~GeV is not allowed even if large entropy is produced by the decays of coherent…
We argue that the QCD axion can arise from many aligned axions with decay constants much smaller than the conventional axion window. If the typical decay constant is of {\cal O}{(100)} GeV to 1 TeV, one or more of the axions or saxions may…
At low energies, the strong interaction is governed by the Goldstone bosons associated with the spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking, which can be systematically described by chiral perturbation theory. In this paper, we apply this theory…
The recently proposed dark dimension scenario reveals that axions can be localized on the Standard Model brane, thereby predicting the quantum chromodynamics (QCD) axion decay constant from the Weak Gravity Conjecture: $f_a\lesssim M_5 \sim…
Finite density lattice QCD usually relies on extrapolations in baryon chemical potential ($\mu_B$), be it Taylor expansion, T' expansion (\cite{Borsanyi:2021sxv}) or analytical continuation. However, their range of validity is difficult to…
The cosmological (upper) limit on the Peccei-Quinn constant, related to the primordial oscillations of the axion field, can be relaxed for a mirror axion model. The simple reason is that the mirror world is colder and so the behavior of the…
We present analytic solutions to the spatially homogeneous axion field equation, using a model potential which strongly resembles the standard anharmonic $(1-\cos N\theta)$ potential, but contains only a piece-wise second order term. Our…
The highly populated, low-energy excitations of a scalar field of mass $m_a\sim 10^{-22}\,\textrm{eV}$ can represent the full dark matter content of the universe and alleviate some tensions in the standard cosmological scenario on…
There has been an attempt to revive the visible QCD axion at the 10 MeV scale assuming that it exclusively couples to the first-generation quarks and the electron. This variant of the QCD axion is claimed to remain phenomenologically…
We reinterpret publicly available $K^+ \to \pi^+ \nu \bar{\nu}$ data collected by NA62 from 2016 to 2024 to constrain the fundamental vectorial coupling of the QCD axion to down and strange quarks. Using a fully reproducible likelihood…
The nature of dark matter is increasingly constrained by cosmological data. In this paper, we examine the implications of the Cosmic Microwave Background anisotropy limits on the density of cold dark matter under different theoretical…
I review recent new lattice QCD results on a few selected topics which are relevant to the heavy ion physics community. Special emphasis is put on the QCD phase diagram towards the chiral limit and at nonzero baryon density as well as the…
Ignorance of the initial condition for the axion dynamics in the early Universe has led us to consider an $O(1)$ valued initial amplitude, and that prefers the decay constant, $F_a$, of the QCD axion to be an intermediate scale such as…
We improve the precision of the topological susceptibility of QCD, and therefore of the QCD axion mass, by including $O(\alpha_{\rm em})$ and NNLO corrections in the chiral expansion, which amount to 0.65(21)% and -0.71(29)% respectively.…
We discuss bounds on the cosmological relativistic energy density as a function of redshift, reviewing the big bang nucleosynthesis and cosmic microwave background bounds, updating bounds from large scale structure, and introducing a new…
The axion is a hypothetical elementary particle postulated by the Peccei-Quinn theory to resolve the strong CP problem in QCD. If axions exist and have low mass, they are a candidate for dark matter as well. So far our knowledge of the…
QCD inequalities are derived for the masses of mesons and baryons containing a single heavy quark using the heavy quark effective field theory. A rigorous lower bound is obtained for the $\bar\Lambda$ parameters of the heavy quark effective…
A scalar field $\phi$ endowed with a trigonometric potential has been proposed to play the role of Dark Matter. A deep study of the cosmological evolution of linear perturbations, and its comparison to the Cold Dark Matter (CDM) and Fuzzy…