Related papers: Higher topological charge and the QCD vacuum
If the QCD axion is a significant component of dark matter, and if the universe was once hotter than a few hundred MeV, the axion relic abundance depends on the function $\chi(T)$, the temperature-dependent topological susceptibility.…
We propose a new mechanism to produce axion dark matter from inflationary fluctuations. Quantum fluctuations during inflation are strengthened by a coupling of the axion kinetic term to the inflaton, which we parametrize as an effective…
We survey recent lattice results on QCD topological properties. The behaviour of the topological susceptibility at the deconfining phase transition has been determined. This advance has been made possible by an i) an improvement of the…
A QCD axion with a time-dependent decay constant has been known to be able to accommodate high-scale inflation without producing topological defects or too large isocurvature perturbations on CMB scales. We point out that a dynamical decay…
Recently it was shown that dark matter with mass of order the weak scale can be charged under a new long-range force, decoupled from the Standard Model, with only weak constraints from early Universe cosmology. Here we consider the…
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…
We discuss production of QCD axion dark matter in a novel scenario, which assumes time-varying scale of Peccei-Quinn symmetry breaking. The latter decreases as the Universe's temperature at early times and eventually stabilises at a large…
In this work we study the topological properties of the $G_2$ lattice gauge theory by means of Monte Carlo simulations. We focus on the behaviour of topological quantities across the deconfinement transition and investigate observables…
Axion cosmology needs the QCD topological susceptibility between 400 and 1100 MeV. In this range the bottom quark is inconvenient to include in lattice simulations, but not heavy enough to ignore. We estimate its effect on the…
The singlet coupling to the topological charge density in the instanton vacuum, causes the instantons and antiinstantons to be screened over distances of the order of 1/2 fm. Dilute instanton systems behave as a free gas, while dense…
The QCD topological observables are essential inputs to obtain theoretical predictions about axion phenomenology, which are of utmost importance for current and future experimental searches for this particle. Among them, we focus on the…
We derive two features of axion cosmology that may have cosmological implications, whether or not axions are dark matter: For the full range of allowed axion masses, the evolution of a cosmic axion background allows large CP violation until…
One of the intriguing properties characteristic to three-dimensional topological materials is the topological magnetoelectric phenomena arising from a topological term called the $\theta$ term. Such magnetoelectric phenomena are often…
We investigate the topological properties of the QCD vacuum with 4 flavours of dynamical staggered fermions at finite temperature. To calculate the topological susceptibility we use the field-theoretical method. As in the quenched case, a…
In this work we compute the axion mass and, from this (exploiting a well-known relation), we also derive an expression for the QCD topological susceptibility in the finite-temperature case, both below and above the chiral phase transition…
Monte Carlo studies of pure glue SU(3) gauge theory using the overlap-based topological charge operator have revealed a laminar structure in the QCD vacuum consisting of extended, thin, coherent, locally 3-dimensional sheets of topological…
We show that heavy axion domain walls induce domain walls of the QCD axion through a mixing between the heavy axion and the QCD axion, even when the pre-inflationary initial condition is assumed for the QCD axion. The induced domain walls…
The relic density of dark matter in the $\Lambda$CDM model restricts the parameter space for a cosmological axion field, constraining the axion decay constant, the initial amplitude of the axion field and the axion mass. It is shown via…
We investigate the topological properties of $N_f = 2+1$ QCD with physical quark masses, at temperatures around 500 MeV. With the aim of obtaining a reliable sampling of topological modes in a regime where the fluctuations of the…
We perform a systematic study of the modifications to the QCD vacuum energy density $\epsilon_{vac}$ in the zero-temperature case ($T=0$) caused by a small, but non-zero, value of the parameter $\theta$, using different effective Lagrangian…