Related papers: Cosmology in the presence of multiple light moduli
Millicharged particles are generic in theories of dark sectors. A cosmic or local abundance of them may be produced by the early universe, stellar environments, or the decay or annihilation of dark matter/dark energy. Furthermore, if such…
Supersymmetry and string theory suggest the existence of light moduli. Their presence, or absence, controls the realization of supersymmetry at low energies. If there are no such fields, or if all such fields are fixed in a supersymmetric…
If moduli, or other long-lived heavy states, decay in the early universe in part into light and feebly interacting particles (such as axions), these decay products could account for the additional energy density in radiation that is…
A generic class of string theories predicts the existence of light moduli fields, and they are expected to have masses $m_\phi$ comparable to the gravitino mass $m_{3/2}$ which is in a range of $10^{-2}$keV--1GeV in gauge-mediated…
Low-scale supersymmetry breaking in string motivated theories implies the presence of O(100) TeV scale moduli, which generically lead to a significant modification of the history of the universe prior to Big Bang Nucleosynthesis. Such an…
In recent years it has been realised that pre-BBN decays of moduli can be a significant source of dark matter production, giving a `non-thermal WIMP miracle' and substantially reduced fine-tuning in cosmological axion physics. We study…
The cosmological moduli problem for relatively heavy moduli fields is reinvestigated. For this purpose we examine the decay of a modulus field at a quantitative level. The modulus dominantly decays into gauge bosons and gauginos, provided…
We propose heavy axions as a natural superheavy dark matter candidate in string theory, with the relic density of dark matter originating in quantum fluctuations during cosmic inflation. String Theory is well known for the possibility of…
Many models of supersymmetry breaking, in the context of either supergravity or superstring theories, predict the presence of particles with Planck-suppressed couplings and masses around the weak scale. These particles are generically…
In dark matter (DM) models, the production of a gamma line (or of a "box-shaped" gamma-ray spectrum) from DM annihilation proceeds in general from a loop diagram involving a heavy charged particle. If the charged particle in the loop…
Cosmological constraints on moduli, whose coupling to matter is stronger than Planck mass suppressed coupling, are derived. In particular, moduli are considered to be produced by oscillating loops of cosmic strings and constraints are…
We study the evolution of perturbations during the domination and decay of a massive particle species whose mass and decay rate are allowed to depend on the expectation value of a light scalar field. We specialize in the case where the…
Dark radiation is a compelling extension to $\Lambda$CDM: current experimental results hint at $\Delta N_{\rm eff} \gtrsim 0.5$, which is increased to $\Delta N_{\rm eff} \simeq 1$ if the recent BICEP2 results are included. In recent years…
Although the standard {\Lambda}CDM model describes the cosmic microwave background radiation and the large scale structure of the Universe with great success, it has some tensions with observations in the effective number of neutrino…
In this article we study the significance of string loop corrections, in a perturbative moduli stabilization scenario, focusing on their role in unraveling the origin of dark radiation in the late cosmological epoch and their correlation to…
Dark matter is poorly constrained by direct detection experiments at masses below 1 MeV. This is an important target for the next generation of experiments, and several methods have been proposed to probe this mass range. One class of such…
Cosmological axions, an important dark matter candidate, are generated when a scalar field with a spontaneously broken O(2) invariance develops an explicitly O(2)-breaking tilt cosmologically, leading to coherent production of…
Moduli fields with Planck-suppressed couplings to light species are common in string compactifications. Decays of these moduli can reheat the universe at a late time and produce dark matter non-thermally. For generic moduli fields motivated…
We consider moduli fields interacting with thermalized relativistic matter. We determine the temperature dependence of their damping rate and find it is dominated by thermal effects in the high temperature regime, i.e. for temperatures…
Dark matter particles need not be completely stable, and in fact they may be decaying now. We consider this possibility in the frameworks of universal extra dimensions and supersymmetry with very late decays of WIMPs to Kaluza-Klein…