Related papers: Axion Poltergeist
An axion rotating in field space can produce dark photons in the early universe via tachyonic instability. This explosive particle production creates a background of stochastic gravitational waves that may be visible at pulsar timing arrays…
Gravitational waves (GWs) provide a powerful probe of the early universe due to their ability to free-stream across cosmic history. We study GW production in a compelling scenario where a rotating axion(-like) field becomes relevant for a…
Supersymmetry predicts multiple flat directions, some of which carry a net baryon or lepton number. Condensates in such directions form during inflation and later fragment into Q-balls, which can become the building blocks of primordial…
Axion rotations can simultaneously explain the dark matter abundance and the baryon asymmetry of the Universe by kinetic misalignment and axiogenesis. We consider a scenario in which the Peccei-Quinn symmetry breaking field is as large as…
We propose a mechanism called axiogenesis where the cosmological excess of baryons over antibaryons is generated from the rotation of the QCD axion. The Peccei-Quinn (PQ) symmetry may be explicitly broken in the early universe, inducing the…
Generating axion dark matter through the kinetic misalignment mechanism implies the generation of large asymmetries for Standard Model fermions in the early universe. Even if these asymmetries are washed out at later times, they can trigger…
We have recently shown that axions and axion-like particles (ALPs) may emit an observable stochastic gravitational wave (GW) background when they begin to oscillate in the early universe. In this note, we identify the regions of ALP…
Rotations of an axion field in field space provide a natural origin for an era of kination domination, where the energy density is dominated by the kinetic term of the axion field, preceded by an early era of matter domination. Remarkably,…
Identifying dark matter candidates that simultaneously generate multiple observable cosmological signatures is a key goal in connecting particle physics with upcoming observations. Axion-like particles coupled to the Standard Model photon…
The axion, as a leading dark matter candidate, is the target of many ongoing and proposed experimental searches based on its coupling to photons. Ultralight axions that couple to photons can also cause polarization rotation of light, which…
The misalignment mechanism allows for the efficient, and usually very cold, production of light scalar bosons, such as axion-like particles (ALPs), making them an appealing dark matter candidate. However, in certain cases, such as in the…
Gravitational waves provide a novel way to probe axions or axion-like particles coupled to a dark photon field, even in the absence of couplings to Standard Model particles. In the conventional misalignment mechanism, the generation of an…
The reheating of the universe by the evaporation of light primordial black holes (PBHs) can leave a stochastic gravitational-wave (GW) background in the early Universe. In the monochromatic limit, their simultaneous evaporation produces an…
We demonstrate that the co-genesis of baryon asymmetry and dark matter can be achieved through the rotation of an axion-like particle, driven by a flip in the vacuum manifold's direction at the end of inflation. This can occur if the axion…
The coherent oscillation of axionic fields naturally drives copious production of dark photon particles in the early universe, due to resonance and tachyonic enhancement. During the process, energy is abruptly transferred from the former to…
In this talk, I review briefly a scenario for the evolution of a string-inspired cosmological model, in which condensates of primordial gravitational waves (GW), formed at the very early eras after the Big Bang, are considered responsible…
Axions and axion-like particles are ubiquitous in extensions of the Standard Model and offer a unifying framework for addressing open problems in cosmology. Depending on their mass and interactions, axions can act as dark matter, drive…
Axion-like fields are naturally generated by a mechanism of anomaly cancellation of one or more anomalous gauge abelian symmetries at the Planck scale, emerging as duals of a two-form from the massless bosonic sector of string theory. This…
In the framework of axion-gauge fields models, primordial gravitational wave perturbations could be generated during the inflationary epoch from not only the quantum fluctuation of gravitons but also the dynamics of hidden gauge fields…
A new era of exploring the early Universe may have begun with the recent strong evidence for the stochastic gravitational wave (GW) background from the data reported by NANOGrav, EPTA, PPTA, and CPTA. Inspired by this, we propose a new…