Related papers: The meso-inflationary QCD axion
Large blue tilted spectral index axionic isocurvature perturbations can be produced when the axion sector is far out of equilibrium during inflation through an initial Peccei-Quinn (PQ) symmetry breaking field displacement along a nearly…
In this talk, I shall focus on theories beyond the Standard Model which predict massive neutrinos. Hybrid inflation emerges naturally in these theories: the slow-rolling inflaton field is a gauge singlet which couples with a GUT Higgs field…
We study for what specific values of the theoretical parameters the axion can form the totality of cold dark matter. We examine the allowed axion parameter region in the light of recent data collected by the WMAP5 mission plus baryon…
We propose a novel mechanism to suppress the isocurvature perturbations of the QCD axion. The point is that the QCD interactions become strong at an intermediate or high energy scale in the very early Universe, if the Higgs field has a…
In theories of axion dark matter with large axion decay constant, temperature variations in the CMB are extremely sensitive to perturbations in the initial axion field, allowing one to place a lower bound on the total amount of inflation.…
In axion gauge field inflation an axion-like particle driving cosmic inflation is coupled to the Chern-Simons density of an Abelian or non-Abelian gauge group. In the case of a non-Abelian gauge group, this can lead to the formation of a…
Cold dark matter axions produced in the post-inflationary Peccei-Quinn symmetry breaking scenario serve as clear targets for their experimental detection, since it is in principle possible to give a sharp prediction for their mass once we…
We show how the motion through the extra dimensions of a gas of branes and antibranes can, under certain circumstances, produce an era of inflation as seen by observers trapped on a 3-brane, with the inflaton being the inter-brane…
We investigate a cosmological scenario in which the Peccei-Quinn (PQ) symmetry remains broken in the entire history of the Universe, thereby avoiding the formation of axion strings and domain walls. Contrary to the conventional expectation,…
Ultra-light axions ($m_a\lesssim 10^{-18}$eV), motivated by string theory, can be a powerful probe of the energy scale of inflation. In contrast to heavier axions the isocurvature modes in the ultra-light axions can coexist with observable…
Fluctuations of scalar fields produced at the stage of preheating after inflation are so large that they can break supersymmetry much stronger than inflation itself. These fluctuations may lead to symmetry restoration along flat directions…
In this paper, we consider a possibility that the temperature anisotropy of cosmic microwave background (CMB) is dominantly generated by the primordial fluctuations of QCD-axion like particles under a circumstance that inflaton's…
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…
The recent BICEP2 result shows that the Universe once has gone through the vacuum with the GUT scale energy density. The implied high scale inflation nullifies the dilution idea of topological defects, strings and domain walls, of the…
Because of their quantum fluctuations, axion fields had a chance to experience field excursions traversing many minima of their potentials during inflation. We study this situation by analyzing the dynamics of an axion-spectator field…
We study the system of axion strings that forms in the early Universe if the Peccei-Quinn symmetry is restored after inflation. Using numerical simulations, we establish the existence of an asymptotic solution to which the system is…
The coupling between a pseudo-scalar inflaton and a gauge field leads to an amount of additional density perturbations and gravitational waves (GWs) that is strongly sensitive to the inflaton speed. This naturally results in enhanced GWs at…
We investigate non-Gaussian isocurvature perturbations generated by the evolution of Goldstone modes during inflation. If a global symmetry is broken ``before'' inflation, the resulting Goldstone modes are disordered during inflation in a…
We discuss the additional perturbation introduced during inflation by quantum stress tensor fluctuations of a conformally invariant field such as the photon. We consider both a kinematical model, which deals only with the expansion…
Motivated by the string landscape we examine scenarios for which inflation is a two-step process, with a comparatively short inflationary epoch near the string scale and a longer period at a much lower energy (like the TeV scale). We…