Related papers: Axion cosmology with long-lived domain walls
The serious cosmological problems created by the axion-string/axion-domain-wall system in standard axion models are alleviated by positing the existence of a new confining force. The instantons of this force can generate an axion potential…
In this paper, we study the compatibility of biased domain wall scenarios with current gravitational wave data. We show that the Cosmic Microwave Background bounds on the fractional density of gravitational waves at the time of decoupling…
Axions are considered as a candidate of dark matter. The axions form coherent clouds which delay and amplify gravitational waves (GWs) at a resonant frequency. That is, the coherent axion clouds produce secondary GWs following a primary…
Thermal inflation is an attractive solution to the cosmological moduli problem. However, domain walls may be formed after thermal inflation and some mechanisms are needed to eliminate the domain wall before it dominates the Universe. We…
The analysis of domain wall dynamics is often simplified to one dimensional physics. For domain walls in thin films, more realistic approaches require the description as two dimensional objects. This includes the study of vortices and…
Axions have for some time been considered a plausible candidate for dark matter. They can be produced through misalignment, but it has been argued that when inflation occurs before a Peccei-Quinn transition, appreciable production can…
For most of cosmic history, the evolution of our Universe has been governed by the physics of a 'dark sector', consisting of dark matter and dark energy, whose properties are only understood in a schematic way. The influence of these…
We study the early Universe evolution of axion-like particle (ALP) domain walls taking into account the effect of friction from particles in the surrounding plasma, including the case of particles in thermal equilibrium and frozen out…
Models that produce Axion-Like-Particles (ALP) after cosmological inflation due to spontaneous $U(1)$ symmetry breaking also produce cosmic string networks. Those axionic strings lose energy through gravitational wave emission during the…
Generic axion models give rise to axion domain walls in the early Universe and they have to disappear not to overclose the universe, thus limiting the nature of discrete symmetry allowed in these type of models. Through QCD sphalerons, net…
We put constraints on the normalized energy density in gravitaional waves from cosmic domain walls (DWs) by searching for the stochastic gravitational-wave background (SGWB) in the data of Advanced LIGO and Virgo's first three observing…
We present a novel framework of the post-inflationary composite axion to address the strong CP problem without the cosmological domain wall problem. Conventional composite axion models lead to the domain wall number greater than one,…
We consider the scenario in which the Peccei-Quinn symmetry breaking is followed by a period of inflation. A particularly interesting case is that the string-domain wall network produced by the symmetry breaking enters the horizon after the…
It is shown that late-time decay of domain walls can dilute unwanted relics such as moduli, if the universe was dominated by frustrated domain walls with tension $\sigma = (1 - 100 TeV)^3$. Since energy density of the frustrated domain…
Axions are produced during a period of dilaton-driven inflation by amplification of quantum fluctuations. We show that for some range of string cosmology parameters and some range of axion masses, primordial axions may constitute a large…
We show that axions can be produced from Abelian-Higgs cosmic strings due to the axion-gauge coupling. The strong magnetic field is confined in the string, and the electric field is induced around the moving string, allowing axion…
Networks of cosmic domain walls can form in the early Universe as a consequence of the spontaneous breaking of discrete symmetries. We study the production of a cosmological background of gravitational waves (GWs) from such networks, when…
We propose two novel solutions to the domain wall problem of the QCD axion by introducing a massless or light axion that also couples to gluons. The first solution applies when the new axion forms strings after inflation. Due to its mixing…
We study the evolution of domain wall networks and their phenomenological implications in a model of a real scalar $\chi$, where a $Z_2$-symmetry is slightly broken by a potential bias $V_{bias}$. It is demonstrated that the latter triggers…
Axions arise in many theoretical extensions of the Standard Model of particle physics, in particular the "string axiverse". If the axion masses, $m_a$, and (effective) decay constants, $f_a$, lie in specific ranges, then axions contribute…