Related papers: Quintessential Axions from a New Confining Force
Nearly massless axion-like particles are of interest for astrophysical observations, and some constraints on their parameter space do exist in the literature. Here, we propose to put new constraints on these particles using polarisation…
Axions have emerged as compelling candidates for describing the dark sector of the Universe. In this work, we explore quintessence models inspired by axion-like potentials as a dynamical alternative to the cosmological constant. These…
The possibility of non-trivial representations of the gauge group on wavefunctionals of a gauge invariant quantum field theory leads to a generation of mass for intermediate vector and tensor bosons. The mass parameters m show up as central…
The axion arises in well-motivated extensions of the Standard Model of particle physics and is regarded as an alternative to the weakly interacting massive particle paradigm to explain the nature of dark matter. In this contribution, we…
Many theories of dark energy and modified gravity give rise to scalar fields that couple derivatively to the energy momentum tensor of matter. This is known as disformal coupling. I will show that laboratory searches for axions are ideally…
We propose a new dark matter candidate, quirky dark matter, that is a scalar baryonic bound state of a new non-Abelian force that becomes strong below the electroweak scale. The bound state is made of chiral quirks: new fermions that…
The high-energy Universe is potentially a great laboratory for searching new light bosons such as axion-like particles (ALPs). Cosmic sources are indeed the scene of violent phenomena that involve strong magnetic field and/or very long…
We introduce a novel mechanism where the kinetic energy of a rotating axion can be dissipated by the interactions with dark magnetic monopoles. This mechanism leads to a framework where the QCD axion and dark monopoles account for the dark…
A simple explanation of the W+dijet excess recently reported by the CDF collaboration involves the introduction of a new gauge boson with sizable couplings to quarks, but with no or highly suppressed couplings to leptons. Anomaly-free…
Dark gauge sectors and axions are well-motivated in string theory. We demonstrate that if a confining gauge sector gives rise to dark glueballs that are a fraction of the dark matter, and the associated axion has a decay constant near the…
Chameleon dark energy is a matter-coupled scalar field which hides its fifth forces locally by becoming massive. We estimate torsion pendulum constraints on the residual fifth forces due to models with gravitation-strength couplings.…
Our understanding of the Universe is known to be incomplete and new gauge forces beyond those of the Standard Model might be crucial to describing its observed properties. A minimal and well-motivated possibility is a pure Yang-Mills…
Recent cosmological observations suggest the presence of small but nonzero cosmological constant $\Lambda_{cos}^4 \simeq (2 \times 10^{-3} eV)^4$. It is an intriguing possibility that such a small cosmological constant is supplied by the…
We review the gauged quintessence scenario, wherein the quintessence scalar field responsible for dark energy is promoted to a complex field charged under a dark $U(1)$ gauge symmetry. This construction leads to new and potentially rich…
Simple models are constructed for "acceleressence" dark energy: the latent heat of a phase transition occurring in a hidden sector governed by the seesaw mass scale v^2/M_Pl, where v is the electroweak scale and M_Pl the gravitational mass…
String theories suggest the existence of a plethora of axion-like fields with masses spread over a huge number of decades. Here we show that these ideas lend themselves to a model of quintessence with no super-Planckian field excursions and…
The possibility of non-trivial representations of the gauge group on wavefunctionals of a gauge invariant quantum field theory leads to a generation of mass for intermediate vector and tensor bosons. The mass parameters "m" show up as…
We study cosmological field configurations (solutions) in a model in which the pseudo-scalar phase of a complex field couples to the Pontryagin density of a massive non-abelian gauge field, in analogy to how the Peccei-Quinn axion field…
It is demonstrated that dark energy, driven by tachyons having non-minimal coupling with curvature and self-interacting inverse cubic potential, decays to cold dark matter in the late universe. It is found that this penomenon yields a…
It is proposed that an ultra-light fermionic species, dubbed cosmic magnino has condensed into a ferromagnetic state in the Universe. The extended structure of domain walls associated with this ferromagnetism accounts for the observed Dark…