Related papers: Inflaxion Dark Matter
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…
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…
A rapid phase of accelerated expansion in the early universe, known as inflation, dilutes all matter except the vacuum induced quantum fluctuations. These are responsible for seeding the initial perturbations in the baryonic matter, the…
A curved space-time is known to act as a source for particle production in environments where gravity plays a significant role. We explore this effect in a minimal setup of cosmic inflation on the production of a scalar dark matter…
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…
We explore the phenomenology of QCD axion and axion-like particle (ALP) dark matter production via misalignment during inflationary reheating. We investigate scenarios involving inflaton oscillating in a generic potential $\sim \phi^n$,…
Dark matter, one of the fundamental components of the universe, has remained mysterious in modern cosmology and particle physics, and hence, this field is of utmost importance at present moment. One of the foundational questions in this…
We present a minimal UV complete framework to embed inflation and dark matter by extending the standard model with a singlet real scalar field (the inflaton) and a singlet fermonic field acting as dark matter. The inflaton features the most…
Despite growing interest and extensive effort to search for ultralight dark matter in the form of a hypothetical dark photon, how it fits into a consistent cosmology is unclear. Several dark photon dark matter production mechanisms proposed…
Assuming axions are potential dark matter (DM) candidate that make up all of the DM abundance, we discuss production of axions via (i) standard misalignment mechanism during the period of reheating and (ii) graviton-mediated 2-to-2…
We introduce a novel mechanism where the kinetic energy of a rotating axion can be dissipated by the interactions with dark magnetic monopoles. This mechanism leads to a framework where the QCD axion and dark monopoles account for the dark…
We propose a universal mechanism of producing dark matter and baryon (lepton) charge at the stage of the quasi-de Sitter expansion of the Universe---inflation. The key ingredient of the mechanism is a linear coupling of the field,…
We present a new mechanism to deplete the energy density of the QCD axion, making decay constants as high as $f_a \simeq 10^{17}\,\rm{GeV}$ viable for generic initial conditions. In our setup, the axion couples to a massless dark photon…
The "gravitational baryogenesis" scenario is extended to generate both baryon and dark matter asymmetries, in the matter dominated era corresponding to post-inflationary reheating. A minimal extension requires a singlet fermion X for dark…
We study scalar dark matter production and reheating via renormalizable inflaton couplings, which include both quartic and trilinear interactions. These processes often depend crucially on collective effects such as resonances, backreaction…
We propose a simple mechanism of light dark matter (DM) production from the decay of the oscillating inflaton condensation. If the reheating temperature after inflation is higher than the inflaton mass, which is of the same order of the…
The subjects of this thesis are the invisible axion and the more general family of axion-like particles. The invisible axion is a hypothetical elementary particle and a cold dark matter candidate. I present an improved computation of the…
We show that the decay of the inflaton field may be incomplete, while nevertheless successfully reheating the universe and leaving a stable remnant that accounts for the present dark matter abundance. We note, in particular, that since the…
We construct an explicit scenario whereby the same material driving inflation in the early Universe can comprise dark matter in the present Universe, using a simple quadratic potential. Following inflation and preheating, the density of…
We discuss the possible sources of dark matter axions in the early universe. In the standard thermal scenario, an axion string network forms at the Peccei-Quinn phase transition $T\sim \fa$ and then radiatively decays into a cosmological…