Related papers: Dark Radiation and the Hagedorn Phase
We review how axion-like particles (ALPs) naturally emerge in the low-energy effective field theory of string compactifications. We focus on the study of their mass spectrum and couplings, stressing that they depend on the mechanism used to…
We consider the generic scenario of dark energy which arises through the latent heat of a hidden sector first order cosmological phase transition. This field could account for the extra radiation degree of freedom suggested by the CMB. We…
We show that primordial black holes (PBHs) develop non-negligible spins through Hawking emission of the large number of axion-like particles generically present in string theory compactifications. This is because scalars can be emitted in…
We consider a minimal extension of the Standard Model with a hidden sector charged under a dark local $U(1)'$ gauge group, accounting simultaneously for light neutrino masses and the observed Dark Matter relic abundance. The model contains…
Open inflation scenario is attracting a renewed interest in the context of string landscape. Since there are a large number of metastable de Sitter vacua in string landscape, tunneling transitions to lower metastable vacua through the…
We motivate a relation between dark energy and the scale of new physics in weakly coupled string theory. This mixing between infrared and ultraviolet physics leads to a unique corner for real-world phenomenology: barring fine-tunings, we…
Four-dimensional compactifications of string theory provide a controlled set of possible gauge representations accounting for BSM particles and dark sector components. In this review, constraints from perturbative Type II string…
We consider the production of axion dark matter through the misalignment mechanism in the context of a nonstandard cosmological history involving early matter domination by a scalar field with a time-dependent decay rate. In cases where the…
The post-inflationary Peccei-Quinn (PQ) symmetry breaking scenario provides a unique opportunity to pinpoint the QCD axion dark matter mass, which is a crucial input for laboratory experiments that are designed for probing specific mass…
We explore a scenario that allows for a strong first order phase-transition of QCD at non-negligible baryon number in the early universe and its possible cosmological observable consequences. The main assumption is a quasi-stable QCD-vacuum…
The tension between measurements of the Hubble constant obtained at different redshifts may provide a hint of new physics active in the relatively early universe, around the epoch of matter-radiation equality. A leading paradigm to resolve…
The vacuum inflation with a boundary condition specified at a short-distance scale in a generally primeval non-flat Universe, and implications of the correspondingly modified primordial power spectrum via the WMAP data are investigated. We…
By arranging the control parameters, we examine whether the mass varying neutrino model PRD 103, 063540 (2021), enabling one to unify inflation with the present dark energy, can be used for producing an early dark energy. The model works in…
The QCD axion has important connections to early universe cosmology. For example, it is often said that isocurvature limits rule out a combination of high axion decay constant, $f_a$, and high inflationary Hubble scale, $H_I$. High scales…
The nature of dark matter remains one of the greatest unsolved mysteries in elementary particle physics. It might well be that the dark matter particle belongs to a dark sector completely secluded or extremely weakly coupled to the visible…
In the early Universe matter was crushed to high densities, in a manner similar to that encountered in gravitational collapse to black holes. String theory suggests that the large entropy of black holes can be understood in terms of…
Braneworld inflation on the resolved warped deformed conifold is represented by the dynamics of a D3-brane probe with the world volume of a brane spanning the large dimensions of the observable Universe. This model was recently proposed as…
Early Dark Energy (EDE) is a prominent model to resolve the Hubble tension, which employs a dynamical axion with a periodic potential. In this work, we take first steps towards the embedding of this model into stable compactifications of…
We show that under certain conditions, closed string tachyon condensation produces a topology changing transition from black strings to Kaluza-Klein "bubbles of nothing." This can occur when the curvature at the horizon is much smaller than…
We consider how accelerated expansion, whether due to inflation or dark energy, imposes strong constraints on fundamental theories obtained by compactification from higher dimensions. For theories that obey the null energy condition (NEC),…