Related papers: Tensor Detection Severely Constrains Axion Dark Ma…
Axions are among the best motivated dark matter candidates. Their production in the early Universe by the vacuum misalignment mechanism gives rise to isocurvature perturbations, which are constrained by cosmic microwave background…
The light pseudoscalar particle, dubbed the axion, borne out of the Peccei-Quinn solution to the strong CP problem in QCD remains elusive. One avenue of inferring its existence is through its coupling to electromagnetic radiation. So far,…
We identify 31 dimensionless physical constants required by particle physics and cosmology, and emphasize that both microphysical constraints and selection effects might help elucidate their origin. Axion cosmology provides an instructive…
Light new vector bosons can be produced gravitationally through quantum fluctuations during inflation; if these particles are feebly coupled and cosmologically metastable, they can account for the observed dark matter abundance. However, in…
Almost 35 years since their suggestion as a good solution to the strong CP-problem, axions remain one of the few viable candidates for the Dark Matter, although still eluding detection. Most of the methods for their detection are based on…
In this paper, we investigate axion physics in 4D F-theory MSSM models. We derive the axion coupling term with QCD gauge fields and the axion potential from a top-down perspective, from both IIB superstring and the dual M-theory picture.…
Two of the most pressing questions in physics are the microscopic nature of the dark matter that comprises 84% of the mass in the universe and the absence of a neutron electric dipole moment. These questions would be resolved by the…
Searches for dark matter decaying into photons constrain its lifetime to be many orders of magnitude larger than the age of the Universe. A corollary statement is that the abundance of any particle that can decay into photons over…
The observed baryon asymmetry, as well as potentially an asymmetry in the dark matter sector, can be produced through dissipative particle production during inflation. A distinctive feature of this mechanism is the generation of matter…
Recently, BICEP2 measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) $B$-mode polarization at degree angular scales has indicated the presence of tensor modes with a high tensor-to-scalar ratio of $r=0.2$ when assuming nearly…
A number of proposals have been put forward for detecting axion dark matter (DM) with grand unification scale decay constants that rely on the conversion of coherent DM axions to oscillating magnetic fields in the presence of static,…
A leading direction in the hunt for axion dark matter is to search for its influence on nuclear spins. The detection scheme involves polarizing a sample of nuclei within a strong static magnetic field and then looking for a spin precession…
We explore the cosmological sensitivity to the amplitude of isocurvature fluctuations that would be caused by axions in the "anthropic window" where the axion decay constant f_a >> 10^12 GeV and the initial misalignment angle Theta_i << 1.…
A search for dark matter particles is performed using events with large missing transverse momentum, at least one energetic jet, and no leptons, in proton-proton collisions at sqrt(s) = 13 TeV collected with the CMS detector at the LHC. The…
We demonstrate that ultralight axion dark matter with a coupling to photons induces an oscillating global terrestrial magnetic field signal in the presence of the background geomagnetic field of the Earth. This signal is similar in…
The misalignment mechanism for axion production depends on the temperature-dependent axion mass. The latter has recently been determined within the interacting instanton liquid model (IILM), and provides for the first time a well-motivated…
The QCD axion cosmology depends crucially on whether the QCD axion is present during inflation or not. We point out that contrary to the standard criterion, the Peccei-Quinn (PQ) symmetry could remain unbroken during inflation, even when…
We present a search for ultralight axion dark matter coupled to electron spins using a levitated ferromagnetic torsional oscillator (FMTO). This platform directly measures axion-induced torques on a macroscopic spin-polarized body,…
In all supersymmetric theories, gravitinos, with mass suppressed by the Planck scale, are an obvious candidate for dark matter; but if gravitinos ever reached thermal equilibrium, such dark matter is apparently either too abundant or too…
Axions, and axion-like particles, have come back into fashion in the last decades as a possible solution to the galactic-scale crisis suffered by the cold dark matter model. In the framework of the wave Dark Matter model, we have carried…