Related papers: Higher topological charge and the QCD vacuum
Relativistic heavy ion collisions provide the possibility to study the topological charge in QCD matter through the event-by-event fluctuating net axial charge or nonequal numbers of left- and right-handed quarks they generate in the…
We explore the topological susceptibility at finite quark chemical potential and zero temperature in two-color QCD (QC$_2$D) with two flavors. Through the Ward-Takahashi identities of QC$_2$D, we find that the topological susceptibility in…
Cosmological moduli generically come to dominate the energy density of the early universe, and thereby trigger an early matter dominated era. Such non-standard cosmological histories are expected to have profound effects on the evolution…
A new mechanism for producing axion dark matter is proposed. By invoking low-scale inflation and a kinetic mixing between the axion and the inflaton, it is shown that the axion is driven to a field point slightly displaced from the…
A direct coupling between the inflaton and Standard Model gluons can dynamically raise the QCD confinement scale during inflation, making the axion temporarily heavy and suppressing axion isocurvature perturbations. As inflation proceeds,…
We investigate the level-crossing phenomenon in two-axion systems, where the mass eigenvalues intersect as the mass of one axion increases with the cooling of the universe. This phenomenon can significantly alter the abundance of axions in…
Axions as dark matter is an increasingly important subject in astrophysics and cosmology. Experimental and observational searches are mounting across the mass spectrum of axion-like particles, many of which require detailed knowledge of…
Recent efforts in lattice evaluation of the topological susceptibility had shown that at high temperatures it is given by well-separated instantons (even in QCD with light fermions, where those are highly suppressed). Recent development of…
We present a systematic study of QCD axion production in environments with finite baryon density and temperature, implying significant changes to axion phenomenology. Within heavy baryon chiral perturbation theory, we derive the effective…
Hot axions, thermally produced in the Early Universe, would contribute to dark radiation and are thus subject to present and future constraints from $N_{\rm eff}$. In this paper we quantify the contribution to $N_{\rm eff}$ and its…
For the minimal QCD axion model it is generally believed that overproduction of dark matter constrains the axion mass to be above a certain threshold, or at least that the initial misalignment angle must be tuned if the mass is below that…
Current techniques cannot detect axion dark matter over much of its parameter space, particularly in the theoretically well-motivated region where the axion decay constant f_a lies near the GUT and Planck scales. We suggest a novel…
We study a number of different ingredients related to $\theta$ dependence, the non-dispersive contribution in topological susceptibility with the "wrong" sign, topological sectors in gauge theories, and related subjects using a simple…
We review results concerning the theta dependence of 4D SU(N) gauge theories and QCD, where theta is the coefficient of the CP-violating topological term in the Lagrangian. In particular, we discuss theta dependence in the large-N limit.…
Cosmological evolution of axion field in the early universe might be significantly affected by a thermal friction induced by the axion coupling to thermalized hidden sector. We examine the effects of such a thermal friction on axion dark…
A QCD axion with a decay constant below $ 10 ^{ 11} ~{\rm GeV} $ is a strongly-motivated extension to the Standard Model, though its relic abundance from the misalignment mechanism or decay of cosmic defects is insufficient to explain the…
The topological susceptibility and the higher moments of the topological charge distribution in QCD are expressed through certain n-point functions of the scalar and pseudo-scalar quark densities at vanishing momenta, which are free of…
Topological charge susceptibility $\chi_{t}$ for pure gauge SU(3) theory at finite temperature is studied using anisotropic lattices. The over-improved stout-link smoothing method is utilized to calculate the topological charge. Near the…
We consider a dark matter (DM) model offering a very natural explanation of the observed relation, $\Omega_{\rm dark} \sim \Omega_{\rm visible}$. This generic consequence of the model is a result of the common origin of both types of matter…
Very stringent experimental bounds exist on the amount of P and CP violation in strong interactions. Nevertheless, the presence of non-Abelian topological solutions and the axial anomaly make the issue of CP invariance in QCD non-trivial…