Related papers: Constraining Postinflationary Axions with Pulsar T…
Axion-like particles (ALPs), a class of pseudoscalars common to many extensions of the Standard Model, have the capacity to drain energy from the interiors of stars. Consequently, stellar evolution can be used to derive many constraints on…
Formation of cosmological solitons is generically accompanied by production of gravitational waves (GWs), with a universal GW background expected at frequency scales below that of non-linear dynamics. Beginning with a general…
Axion-like dark matter whose symmetry breaking occurs after the end of inflation predicts enhanced primordial density fluctuations at small scales. This leads to dense axion minihalos (or miniclusters) forming early in the history of the…
We investigate the possible parametric growth of photon amplitudes in a background of axion-like particle (ALP) dark matter. The observed extragalactic background radiation limits the allowed enhancement effect. We derive the resulting…
We demonstrate that the recently announced signal for a stochastic gravitational wave background (SGWB) from pulsar timing array (PTA) observations, if attributed to new physics, is compatible with primordial GW production due to…
Models with axion like particles (ALPs) often predict the formation of a string-domain wall network in the early universe. We study how such networks of defects appear in the context of string theory, and discuss the conditions for their…
The current cosmological constraints on a dark matter axion are reviewed. We describe the basic mechanisms by which axions are created in the early universe, both in the standard thermal scenario in which axion strings form and in…
Axion-like particles (ALPs) can form a network of cosmic strings and domain walls that survives after recombination and leads to anisotropic birefringence of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). In addition to studying cosmic strings, we…
We explore the inflationary dynamics leading to formation of closed domain walls in course of evolution of an axion like particle (ALP) field whose Peccei-Quinn-like phase transition occurred well before inflationary epoch. Evolving after…
Understanding axion cosmology has important experimental consequences since it constrains the range of allowed values for the axion mass. In the standard thermal scenario, which assumes Peccei-Quinn symmetry restoration after inflation, an…
We consider the search for axion-like particles (ALPs) by using time series data of the polarization angle of the light. If the condensation of an ALP plays the role of dark matter, the polarization plane of the light oscillates as a…
String scenarios typically not only predict axion-like particles (ALPs) but also significant amounts of ALP dark radiation originating from the decay of the inflaton or a more general modulus. In this paper, we study the decay of such…
Among the most compelling cold dark matter candidates, the axion has recently been subject to a wide range of astrophysical studies aiming to constraints its properties. We present updated bounds on the isocurvature fraction,…
The extragalactic background light is comprised of the cumulative radiation from all galaxies across the history of the universe. The angular power spectrum of the anisotropies of such a background at near-infrared (IR) frequencies lacks of…
We present constraints on the nature of axions and axionlike particles (ALPs) by analyzing gamma--ray data from neutron stars using the Fermi Large Area Telescope. In addition to axions solving the strong CP problem of particle physics,…
If the Peccei-Quinn symmetry associated to an axion has ever been restored after inflation, axion strings inevitably produce a contribution to the stochastic gravitational wave background. Combining effective field theory analysis with…
We discuss the possible sources of dark matter axions in the early universe. In the standard thermal scenario, an axion string network forms at the Peccei-Quinn phase transition $T\sim \fa$ and then radiatively decays into a cosmological…
Axions or axion-like particles (ALPs) are well-motivated dark matter (DM) candidates whose coupling to photons induces periodic oscillations in the polarization angle of astrophysical light. This work reports the first search for such a…
We show that very compact axion mini-clusters can form in models where axion-like-particle (ALP) dark matter is produced via the kinetic misalignment mechanism, which is well-motivated in pre-inflationary $U(1)$ symmetry breaking scenarios.…
Axions constitute a well-motivated dark matter candidate, and if PQ symmetry breaking occurred after inflation, it should be possible to make a clean prediction for the relation between the axion mass and the axion dark matter density. We…