Related papers: Thermal QCD Axions across Thresholds
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…
We study thermal axion production around the confinement scale. At higher temperatures, we extend current calculations to account for the masses of heavy quarks, whereas we quantify production via hadron scattering at lower temperatures.…
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…
Light axions can potentially leave a cosmic background, just like neutrinos. We complete the study of thermal axion production across the electroweak scale by providing a smooth and continuous treatment through the two phases. Focusing on…
We discuss the thermal production of axions in renormalizable models involving two Higgs doublet fields and a complex singlet field with a global $U(1)$ Peccei-Quinn symmetry, i.e., DFSZ type axion models. We demonstrate that, when the…
We show that when the QCD axion is directly coupled to quarks with $c_q/f \, \partial_\mu a \, \bar{q} \gamma^\mu \gamma^5 q$, such as in DFSZ models, the dominant production mechanism in the early universe at temperatures $1 \, {\rm…
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…
We reanalyze the conditions under which we have a primordial thermal population of axions. Compared with previous studies, we find other processes, involving gluons and quarks, that dominate at high temperatures. We conclude that if the…
It is known for some time that the cosmological bound on the invisible axion scale can be avoided by an early phase of strong QCD. While most approaches rely on theories where the strong coupling constant is determined through the…
Visible matter in the current Universe is a consequence of the phase transition of the strong force, quantum chromodynamics (QCD). This phase transition has occurred at the Universe temperature around $T_c\simeq 165\,$MeV while it was…
We consider the thermal production of axino dark matter in high-scale supersymmetry where all the superpartners except the axino are heavier than the maximum and reheating temperatures. In this case, the axinos are produced dominantly in…
We revisit the joint constraints in the mixed hot dark matter scenario in which both thermally produced QCD axions and relic neutrinos are present. Upon recomputing the cosmological axion abundance via recent advances in the literature, we…
The naturalness problem of PQ symmetry motivates study of the heavy QCD axion, with masses $m_a >$ 1 MeV generated at scales above the QCD scale, and low values of the PQ symmetry breaking scale, $f_a$. We compute the abundance of such…
Axino arises in supersymmetric versions of axion models and is a natural candidate for cold or warm dark matter. Here we revisit axino dark matter produced thermally and non-thermally in light of recent developments. First we discuss the…
We study the cosmological impact of the supersymmetric DFSZ axion model. Extending recent works, we first provide a comprehensive analysis of thermal production of the DFSZ axino considering all the possible scattering, decay and inverse…
We investigate axial charge production in two-color QCD out of equilibrium. We compute the real-time evolution starting with spatially homogeneous strong gauge fields, while the fermions are in vacuum. The idealized class of initial…
We investigate the cosmological consequences of axion interactions with standard model fermions accurately and precisely. Our analysis is entirely based on a phase space framework that allows us to keep track of the axion distribution in…
We study in detail a supersymmetric Peccei-Quinn model, which has a DFSZ and a KSVZ version. The fields breaking the Peccei-Quinn (PQ) symmetry correspond to flat directions (flaton fields) and have unsuppressed couplings when PQ symmetry…
One of the targets of future Cosmic Microwave Background and Baryon Acoustic Oscillation measurements is to improve the current accuracy in the neutrino sector and reach a much better sensitivity on extra dark radiation in the Early…
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…