Related papers: The Supercooled Universe
Our Universe is ruled by quantum mechanics and its extension Quantum Field Theory (QFT). However, the explanations for a number of cosmological phenomena such as inflation, dark energy, symmetry breakings, and phase transitions need the…
The primordial nucleosinthesys of the element can be influenced by the transitions of phase that take place after the Big Bang, such as the QCD transition. In order to study the effect of this phase transition, in this work we compute the…
The relic abundance of heavy stable particles charged under a confining gauge group can be depleted by a second stage of annihilations near the deconfinement temperature. This proceeds via the formation of quarkonia-like states, in which…
The existence of light QCD axions, whose mass depends on an additional free parameter, can lead to a new ground state of matter, where the sourced axion field reduces the nucleon effective mass. The presence of the axion field has…
We discuss a novel cold dark matter candidate which is formed from the ordinary quarks during the QCD phase transition when the axion domain wall undergoes an unchecked collapse due to the tension in the wall. If a large number of quarks is…
Axion-like particles (ALPs) are often considered as good candidates for dark matter. Several mechanisms generating relic abundance of ALP dark matter have been proposed. They may involve processes which take place before, during or after…
Dark matter may be coupled to dark radiation: light degrees of freedom that mediate forces between dark sector particles. Cosmological constraints favor dark radiation that is colder than Standard Model radiation. In models with fixed…
The thermal history of the universe before the epoch of nucleosynthesis is unknown. The maximum temperature in the radiation-dominated era, which we will refer to as the reheat temperature, may have been as low as 0.7 MeV. In this paper we…
By making use of a class of steep exponential type of potentials, which has been recently used to describe quintessential inflation, we show how a unified picture for both inflation, dark energy and dark matter can emerge entirely through…
The Peccei-Quinn mechanism presents a neat solution to the strong CP problem. As a by-product, it provides an ideal dark matter candidate, "the axion", albeit with a tiny mass. Axions therefore can act as dark radiation if excited with…
At the end of inflation the Universe is frozen in a near zero-entropy state with energy density in a coherent scalar field and must be "defrosted" to produce the observed entropy and baryon number. Baryon asymmetry may be generated by the…
We examine the cosmological consequences of the heavy quarks in KSVZ-type axion models. We find that their presence often causes an early matter domination phase, altering the evolution of the Universe. This extends the axion mass into the…
Recently we have proposed a simple hadronic axion model within gauge-mediated supersymmetry breaking. In this paper we discuss various cosmological consequences of the model in great detail. A particular attention is paid to a saxion, a…
In general the gravitino mass and/or the soft supersymmetry breaking masses in the observable sector can be much larger than the TeV scale. Depending on the relation between the masses, new important channels for gravitino production in the…
Axions might play a crucial role for the solution of the strong CP-problem and explanation of cold dark matter in the universe. In addition they may find applications in the formulation of inflationary models for the early universe and can…
In the audible axion mechanism, axion-like particles source primordial gravitational waves via their coupling to a dark Abelian gauge field. The original setup, however, relies on a large axion decay constant and coupling to produce sizable…
We investigate various dark energy models by taking into account the thermal effects induced from Hawking radiation on the apparent horizon of the Universe, for example near a finite-time future singularity. If the dark energy density…
The different phases of QCD at finite temperature and density lead to interesting effects in cosmology and astrophysics. In this work I review some aspects of the cosmological QCD transition and of astrophysics at high baryon density.
The freeze-in mechanism has been shown to allow the simultaneous generation of cosmic dark matter and a viable matter-antimatter asymmetry in the universe. When the underlying interactions are described by higher-dimensional,…
The EDGES Collaboration has reported an anomalously strong 21cm absorption feature corresponding to the era of first star formation, which may indirectly betray the influence of dark matter during this epoch. We demonstrate that, by virtue…