Related papers: Opening up the QCD axion window
Any neutral boson such as a dark photon or dark Higgs that is part of a non-standard sector of particles can mix with its standard model counterpart. When very weakly mixed with the Standard Model, these particles are produced in the early…
The QCD axion and axion-like particles, as leading dark matter candidates, can also have interesting implications for dark matter substructures if the Peccei-Quinn symmetry is broken after inflation. In such a scenario, axion perturbations…
We show that supersymmetric axion models breaking the PQ symmetry by the interplay of non-renormalizable supersymmetric terms and soft supersymmetry breaking terms provide a natural framework not only for generating the axion scale from…
Cosmologically long-lived, composite states arise as natural dark matter candidates in theories with a strongly interacting hidden sector at a scale of 10 - 100 TeV. Light axion-like states, with masses in the 1 MeV - 10 GeV range, are also…
The interaction between the dark/mirror sector and the ordinary sector is considered, where the two sectors interact with each other by sharing the same QCD axion field. This feature makes the mixing between ordinary and dark/mirror photons…
Axion-gluon interaction induces quadratic couplings between the axion and the matter fields. We find that, if the axion is an ultralight dark matter field, it induces small oscillations of the mass of the hadrons as well as other nuclear…
We discuss a QCD-scale composite axion model arising from dark QCD coupled to QCD. The presently proposed scenario not only solves the strong CP problem, but also is compatible with the preheating setup for the QCD baryogenesis. The…
In order to accommodate the QCD axion as the dark matter (DM) in a model in which the Peccei-Quinn (PQ) symmetry is broken before the end of inflation, a relatively low scale of inflation has to be invoked in order to avoid bounds from DM…
We revisit the joint constraints in the mixed hot dark matter scenario in which both thermally produced QCD axions and relic neutrinos are present. Upon recomputing the cosmological axion abundance via recent advances in the literature, we…
We demonstrate that dark matter axion production is enhanced through a natural and unavoidable mechanism: primordial temperature fluctuations periodically modulate the axion mass during the QCD phase transition, thereby triggering…
Axion dark matter coupled via QCD induces a non-zero differential acceleration between test masses of different composition. Tests of the equivalence principle, like the recent MICROSCOPE space mission, are sensitive to such a signal. We…
The current cosmological constraints on a dark matter axion are reviewed. We describe the basic mechanisms by which axions are created in the early universe, both in the standard thermal scenario in which axion strings form and in…
Axions have emerged as compelling candidates for describing the dark sector of the Universe. In this work, we explore quintessence models inspired by axion-like potentials as a dynamical alternative to the cosmological constant. These…
Considerable theoretical efforts have gone into expanding the reach of the QCD axion beyond its canonical mass--decay-constant relation. The $Z_\mathcal{N}$ QCD axion model reduces the QCD axion mass naturally, by invoking a discrete…
The recently reported X-ray line signal at $E_\gamma \simeq 3.5\, {\rm keV}$ from a stacked spectrum of various galaxy clusters and the Andromeda galaxy may be originating from a decaying dark matter particle of the mass $2 E_\gamma$. A…
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…
It follows on general grounds that the theta dependence in QCD is more complicated than suggested by the large N_c approach or instanton arguments. Generically, the vacuum energy E_{vac}(\theta) is a multi-valued function of \theta…
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…
Cosmological colliders can preserve information from interactions at very high energy scale, and imprint them on cosmological observables. Taking the squeezed limit of cosmological perturbation bispectrum, information of the intermediate…
Recent analyses of WMAP9 data show that dark radiation-- parametrized by the apparent number of additional neutrinos \Delta N_{eff} contributing to the cosmic expansion-- is consistent with the Standard Model and bounded from above by about…