Related papers: Axions, Instantons, and the Lattice
The QCD axion is one of the best motivated dark matter candidates. The misalignment mechanism is well known to produce an abundance of the QCD axion consistent with dark matter for an axion decay constant of order $10^{12}$ GeV. For a…
We compute the QCD axion contribution to the energy density of dark radiation, parameterized by $\Delta N_{\rm eff}$, by solving Boltzmann equations for the momentum distribution functions including the effects of quantum statistics for all…
We discuss recent progress made studies of bulk thermodynamics of strongly interacting matter through lattice simulations of QCD with an almost physical light and strange quark mass spectrum. We present results on the QCD equation of state…
We present lattice results for baryon number, strangeness and electric charge fluctuations as well as their correlations at finite temperature and vanishing chemical potentials, i.e. under conditions relevant for RHIC and LHC. We find that…
I review our current understanding of the properties of strongly interacting matter at high temperatures, based upon numerical calculations in lattice QCD. I discuss the chiral and deconfining aspects of the QCD transition, the equation of…
We study the effect of the elastic scattering on the non-thermal WIMP, which is produced by direct decay of heavy particles at the end of reheating. The non-thermal WIMP becomes important when the reheating temperature is well below the…
QCD point-to-point correlation functions at distances .2-1 fm are very different for different channels, and they tell us a lot about inter-quark interactions. Recent studies based on experimental data, 'instanton liquid' approach and…
The clockwork axion refers to a family of aligned multi-axion models that lead to an exponential hierarchy between the scale of Peccei-Quinn symmetry breaking and the scale of the axion decay constant. The clockworking can bring the…
If there are a plethora of axions in nature, they may have a complicated potential and create an axion landscape. We study a possibility that one of the axions is so light that it is cosmologically stable, explaining the observed dark…
The transition temperature ($T_c$) of QCD is determined by Symanzik improved gauge and stout-link improved staggered fermionic lattice simulations. We use physical masses both for the light quarks ($m_{ud}$) and for the strange quark…
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…
QCD axions are at the crossroads of QCD topology and Dark Matter searches. We present here the current status of topological studies on the lattice, and their implication on axion physics. We outline the specific challenges posed by lattice…
Mass of a baryon as a function of temperature is calculated using colour-singlet partition function for massless quarks (with two flavours) and abelian gluons confined in a bag with a temperature dependent bag pressure constant $B(T)$. The…
We point out that the relic densities of singlet (sterile) neutrinos of interest in viable warm and cold dark matter scenarios, depend on the characteristics of the QCD transition in the early universe. In the most promising of these dark…
The non-extensive self-consistent theory describing the thermodynamics of hadronic systems at high temperatures is used to derive some thermodynamical quantities, as pressure, entropy, speed of sound and trace-anomaly. The calculations are…
Visible matter in the current Universe is a consequence of the phase transition of the strong force, quantum chromodynamics (QCD). This phase transition has occurred at the Universe temperature around $T_c\simeq 165\,$MeV while it was…
We present a determination of freeze-out conditions in heavy-ion collisions based on ratios of cu- mulants of net electric charge fluctuations obtained from lattice QCD. These ratios can reliably be calculated for a wide range of chemical…
We investigate the contribution of instantons to the eigenvalue spectrum of the Dirac operator in quenched QCD. The instanton configurations that we use have been derived, elsewhere, from cooled SU(3) lattice gauge fields and, for…
Cosmological bounds on neutrinos and additional hypothetical light thermal relics, such as QCD axions, are currently among the most restrictive ones. These limits mainly rely on Cosmic Microwave Background temperature anisotropies.…
String scenarios generically predict that we live in a so called axiverse: the Universe with about a hundred of light axion species which are decoupled from the Standard Model particles. However, the axions can couple to the inflaton which…