Related papers: The Supercooled Universe
The origins of matter and radiation in the universe lie in a Hot Big Bang. We present a number of well-motivated cosmologies in which the Big Bang occurs through a strong first order phase transition -- either at the end of inflation, after…
We revisit the cosmological aspects of axion models. In the high-scale inflation scenario, the Peccei-Quinn (PQ) symmetry is likely to be restored during/after inflation. If the curvature of the PQ scalar potential at the origin is smaller…
The Universe may contain sufficiently small size matter-antimatter domains at temperatures of a few hundred MeV, without violating the success of Big Bang Nucleosynthesis. We demonstrate that this possibility enhances the keV scale sterile…
The cosmological scenario where the Peccei-Quinn symmetry is broken after inflation is investigated. In this scenario, topological defects such as strings and domain walls produce a large number of axions, which contribute to the cold dark…
Axions that couple to electromagnetism are produced in the early Universe by, among other channels, freeze-in via the Primakoff process. For sufficiently large axion masses, the same coupling causes the axions to decay into two photons,…
The high temperature and electron degeneracy attained during a supernova allow for the formation of a large muon abundance within the core of the resulting proto-neutron star. If new pseudoscalar degrees of freedom have large couplings to…
We study the quark-hadron phase transition within an effective model of QCD, and find that in a reasonable range of the main parameters of the model, bodies with quark content between $10^{-2}$ and 10 solar masses can have been formed in…
Superconductivity in low carrier density metals challenges the conventional electron-phonon theory due to the absence of retardation required to overcome Coulomb repulsion. In quantum critical polar metals, the Coulomb repulsion is heavily…
We propose a new mechanism to suppress the axion isocurvature perturbation, while producing the right amount of axion dark matter, within the framework of supersymmetric axion models with the axion scale induced by supersymmetry breaking.…
If, during the early Universe epoch, the dark matter particle thermalizes in a hidden sector which does not thermalize with the Standard Model thermal bath, its relativistic thermal decoupling can easily lead to the observed relic density,…
Axions in the Peccei-Quinn (PQ) mechanism provide a promising solution to the strong CP problem in the standard model of particle physics. Coherently generated PQ scalar fields could dominate the energy density in the early Universe and…
A phenomenological model of dark energy that tracks the baryonic and cold dark matter at early times but resembles a cosmological constant at late times is explored. In the transition between these two regimes, the dark energy density drops…
Taking axion inflation as an example, we estimate the maximal temperature ($T_{\rm max}^{ }$) that can be reached in the post-inflationary universe, as a function of the confinement scale of a non-Abelian dark sector ($\Lambda_{\rm IR}^{…
We present a minimal extension of the standard model that includes a long-lived fermion with weak-scale mass and an ${\cal O}({\rm GeV})$ fermionic dark matter candidate both of which are coupled to quarks. Decays of a TeV-scale colored…
We apply the squeezed state formalism to scalar field dark matter (e.g. axion) perturbations generated during inflation. As for the inflationary perturbations, the scalar field state becomes highly squeezed as modes exit the horizon. For as…
The phase of inflationary expansion in the early universe produces superheavy relics in a mass window between 10^{12} GeV and 10^{14} GeV. Decay or annihilation of these superheavy relics can explain the observed ultrahigh energy cosmic…
We study how the oscillations of the neutrinos affect their thermalization process during the reheating period with temperature O(1) MeV in the early universe. We follow the evolution of the neutrino density matrices and investigate how the…
Some recent developments concerning the role of strange quark matter for astrophysical systems and the QCD phase transition in the early universe are addressed. Causality constraints of the soft nuclear equation of state as extracted from…
Our ignorance of the period between the end of inflation and the beginning of Big Bang Nucleosynthesis limits our understanding of the origins and evolution of dark matter. One possibility is that the Universe's energy density was dominated…
A QCD phase transition in the early universe could have left inhomogeneities in the baryon to photon ratio and in isospin that might have affected nucleosynthesis later on. At very high temperature QCD plasma can be described by…