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The cold dark matter (CDM) cosmological model has been remarkably successful in explaining cosmic structure over an enormous span of redshift, but it has faced persistent challenges from observations that probe the innermost regions of dark…
Cold dark matter explains a wide range of data on cosmological scales. However, there has been a steady accumulation of evidence for discrepancies between simulations and observations at scales smaller than galaxy clusters. Solutions to…
The cosmological scenario where the Peccei-Quinn symmetry is broken after inflation is investigated. In this scenario, topological defects such as strings and domain walls produce a large number of axions, which contribute to the cold dark…
Structure formation creates high temperature and density regions in the Universe that allow the conversion of matter into more stable states, with a corresponding emission of relativistic matter and radiation. An example of such a mechanism…
The cold dark matter (CDM) paradigm provides a remarkably good description of the Universe's large-scale structure. However, some discrepancies exist between its predictions and observations at very small sub-galactic scales. To address…
Over the last decade, warm dark matter (WDM) has been repeatedly proposed as an alternative scenario to the standard cold dark matter (CDM) one, potentially resolving several disagreements between the CDM model and observations on small…
We propose a scenario where the saxion dominates the energy density of the Universe and reheats the standard model sector via the dilatonic coupling, while its axionic partner contributes to dark matter decaying into photons via the same…
Scenarios with axion-like particles of variable masses, from the milli-eV range to ultralight, can be generated in a natural way in the context of effective field theory models with anomalous $U(1)$ gauge symmetries. They include…
The axino is a promising candidate for dark matter in the Universe. It is electrically and color neutral, very weakly interacting, and could be - as assumed in this study - the lightest supersymmetric particle, which is stable for unbroken…
We present a simple UV completion of Atomic Dark Matter (aDM) in which heavy right-handed neutrinos decay to induce both dark and lepton number densities. This model addresses several outstanding cosmological problems: the…
We present small-scale structure constraints on sterile dark matter produced from a heavy mediator particle, inspired by models of moduli decay. Dark matter particles produced through this mechanism can contribute to the entire dark matter…
It is usually assumed that dark matter is produced during the radiation dominated era. There is, however, no direct evidence for radiation domination prior to big-bang nucleosynthesis. Two non-standard thermal histories are considered. In…
The axion arises in well-motivated extensions of the Standard Model of particle physics and is regarded as an alternative to the weakly interacting massive particle paradigm to explain the nature of dark matter. In this contribution, we…
We consider supersymmetric (SUSY) models wherein the strong CP problem is solved by the Peccei-Quinn (PQ) mechanism with a concommitant axion/axino supermultiplet. We examine R-parity conserving models where the neutralino is the lightest…
By coupling to both the Higgs and electroweak gauge sectors, an axion can generate the matter-antimatter asymmetry in the universe via electroweak baryogenesis when the axion decay constant lies within the range of approximately $10^5$ and…
The companion-axion model introduces a second QCD axion to rescue the Peccei-Quinn solution to the strong-CP problem from the effects of colored gravitational instantons. As in single-axion models, the two axions predicted by the…
The appearance of scalar/moduli fields in the early universe, as motivated by string theory, naturally leads to non-thermal "moduli cosmology". Such cosmology provides a consistent framework where the generation of radiation, baryons, and…
The strong CP problem was solved by Peccei & Quinn by introducing axions, a viable candidate for Dark Matter (DM). Here the PQ approach is modified so to yield also Dark Energy (DE). DM and DE arise, in fai proportions, from a single scalar…
We perform an exhaustive scan of the allowed resonant production regime for sterile neutrino dark matter in order to improve constraints for dark matter structures which arise from the non-thermal sterile neutrino energy spectra.…
The generation of dark matter in late decays of quasi-stable massive particles has been proposed as a viable framework to address the excess of power found in numerical N-body simulations for cold dark matter cosmologies. We identify a…