Related papers: Axion Kinetic Misalignment and Parametric Resonanc…
We study the parameter space of cold dark matter axions in two cosmological scenarios with non-standard thermal histories before Big Bang nucleosynthesis: the Low Temperature Reheating (LTR) cosmology and the kination cosmology. If the…
We show that the initial misalignment angle of the QCD axion (or axion-like particles) can be set very close to $\pi$, if the QCD axion has a mixing with another heavy axion which induces the phase shift $\approx \pi$ after inflation. In…
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 $\sim \phi^n$,…
Light scalar and pseudoscalar particles are compelling dark matter candidates, with a vast running experimental program to discover them. Previous studies have shown that these light fields can generate sizable isocurvature perturbations in…
Several theoretical motivations point to ultralight QCD axions with large decay constants $f_a \simeq \mathcal{O}(10^{16}-10^{17})$ GeV, to which experimental proposals are dedicated. This regime is known to face the problem of…
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…
Incorporating the QCD axion and simultaneously satisfying current constraints on the dark matter density and isocurvature fluctuations requires non-minimal fine-tuning of inflationary parameters or the axion misalignment angle (or both) for…
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…
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…
We study the possibility that the axion Peccei-Quinn symmetry is spontaneously broken after the beginning of inflation. This scenario interpolates between pre-inflationary and post-inflationary axion cosmology with significant…
We consider the instability of fluctuations in an oscillating scalar field which obeys the Sine-Gordon equation. We present simple closed-form analytic solutions describing the parametric resonance in the Sine-Gordon model. The structure of…
We compare conventional non-minimally coupled Peccei-Quinn (PQ) inflation with a version of the model in which unitarity conservation is imposed by additional Jordan frame interactions. Assuming instantaneous reheating, the…
We present a model of $F(R)$ gravity in the presence of a string theory motivated misalignment axion like particle materialized in terms of a canonical scalar field minimally coupled with gravity, and we study the cosmological phenomenology…
We explore the interplay of the post-inflationary QCD axion and a light scalar field for the axion domain wall decay and dark matter (DM). The scalar field possesses a nonzero vacuum expectation value (VEV) during inflation, so that its…
We investigate the possibility that the Peccei-Quinn phase transition occurs at a temperature far below the symmetry breaking scale. Low phase transition temperatures are typical in supersymmetric theories, where symmetry breaking fields…
If dark matter is made of QCD axions, its abundance is determined by the vacuum expectation value acquired by the axion field during inflation. The axion is usually assumed to follow the equilibrium distribution arising from quantum…
If the Peccei-Quinn symmetry associated to an axion has ever been restored after inflation, axion strings inevitably produce a contribution to the stochastic gravitational wave background. Combining effective field theory analysis with…
The primordial irreducible gravitational-wave background due to quantum vacuum tensor fluctuations produced during inflation spans a large range of frequencies with an almost scale-invariant spectrum but is too low to be detected by the…
We study minimal versions of Higgs inflation in the presence of a massless QCD axion. While the inflationary energy scale of the metric variant is too high to accommodate isocurvature bounds, it was argued that Palatini Higgs inflation…
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…