Related papers: Dark energy from the string axiverse
Theories with several hundred axion fields have enormous numbers of distinct meta-stable minima. A small fraction of these local minima have vacuum energy compatible with current measurements of dark energy. The potential also contains…
Recent astrophysical observations, pertaining to either high-redshift supernovae or cosmic microwave background temperature fluctuations, as those measured recently by the WMAP satellite, provide us with data of unprecedented accuracy,…
The expansion of the universe has been accepted by scientists for more than a century. However, since the 1990s, observations have suggested that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. Although the source of this acceleration is…
A generic low-energy prediction of string theory is the existence of a large collection of axions, commonly known as a string axiverse. Axions also have a natural cosmological production mechanism, vacuum misalignment, making them…
This paper deals with a cosmological model in which the universe is filled with tachyon dark energy in order to describe current and future accelerating expansion. We obtain that the simplest condition for the regime of phantom energy to…
Generalised axion-like scalar fields provide a well-motivated framework for describing the late-time acceleration of the Universe. As the field evolves, it rolls down its potential and, depending on its mass and initial conditions, it may…
We argue that, for generic string compactifications, dark energy is likely to signal the beginning of the end of our universe, perhaps even through decompactification, with possible implications for the cosmological coincidence problem.…
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…
A model is presented in the philosophy of the "String Axiverse" of Arvanitaki et al (arXiv:0905.4720v2 [hep-th]) that incorporates a coupling of ultralight axions to their corresponding moduli through the mass term. The light fields roll in…
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…
The existence of phantom energy in a universe which evolves to eventually show a big rip doomsday is a possibility which is not excluded by present observational constraints. In this letter it is argued that the field theory associated with…
We review current cosmological constraints on the axion. We describe the basic mechanisms by which axions are created in the early universe, focussing on the standard thermal scenario where the dominant process is through axion radiation by…
The quantum chromodynamics (QCD) axion may solve the strong CP problem and explain the dark matter (DM) abundance of our Universe. The axion was originally proposed to arise as the pseudo-Nambu Goldstone boson of global $\mathrm{U}(1)_{\rm…
In this colloquium-level account, I describe the cosmological constant problem: why is the energy of empty space at least 60 orders of magnitude smaller than several known contributions to it from the Standard Model of particle physics? I…
A generic prediction of string theory is the existence of many axion fields. It has recently been argued that many of these fields should be light and, like the well known QCD axion, lead to observable cosmological consequences. In this…
Observations provide increasingly strong evidence that the universe is accelerating. This revolutionary advance in cosmological observations confronts theoretical cosmology with a tremendous challenge, which it has so far failed to meet.…
The origin of the accelerated expansion of the universe is still unclear and new physics is needed on cosmological scales. We propose and test a novel interpretation of dark energy as originated by an elastic strain due to a cosmic defect…
Dark energy, the main constituent in our expanding universe, responsible for its acceleration, is currently being observed with unprecedented precision through various experiments. While several cosmological models can fit this latest data,…
It has recently been argued that string theory does not admit de Sitter vacua. This would imply that the current accelerated expansion of the universe is not driven by a cosmological constant (or vacuum energy) but by other means such as a…
A favored scenario for axions to be dark matter is for them to form a cosmic string network that subsequently decays, allowing for a tight link between the axion mass and relic abundance. We discuss an example in which the axion is…