Related papers: Remarks on the Axion Domain Wall Problem
After inflation occurs, a weakly coupled scalar field will in general not be in thermal equilibrium but have a distribution of values determined by the inflationary Hubble parameter. If such a field subsequently undergoes discrete symmetry…
We show that heavy axion domain walls induce domain walls of the QCD axion through a mixing between the heavy axion and the QCD axion, even when the pre-inflationary initial condition is assumed for the QCD axion. The induced domain walls…
Thermal inflation is an attractive solution to the cosmological moduli problem. However, domain walls may be formed after thermal inflation and some mechanisms are needed to eliminate the domain wall before it dominates the Universe. We…
We examine the collapse of an axion domain wall bounded by an axionic string. It is found that the collapse proceeds quickly and axion domain walls disappear. However axions are emitted in the collapse and its energy density increases…
Cosmlogical domain walls produced during phase transition are expected to collapse on a cosmologically safe timescale if Vilenkin's condition is satisfied. We show that the decaying processes of these unstable domain walls should be changed…
Many models of dark matter QCD axion requires inflation at a scale $H_{\text{inf}} \lesssim 10^{6}$~GeV and hence does not allow for a detectable tensor mode fluctuation. This is because the domain wall problem forces the Peccei--Quinn…
We study a level crossing between the QCD axion and an axion-like particle, focusing on the recently found phenomenon, the axion roulette, where the axion-like particle runs along the potential, passing through many crests and troughs,…
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 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,…
We revisit the cosmological aspects of axion models. In the high-scale inflation scenario, the Peccei-Quinn (PQ) symmetry is likely to be restored during/after inflation. If the curvature of the PQ scalar potential at the origin is smaller…
We show that the required high quality of the Peccei-Quinn symmetry can be naturally explained in the aligned QCD axion models where the QCD axion arises from multiple axions with decay constants much smaller than the axion window, e.g.,…
A recent study has shown that domain walls with inflationary initial fluctuations exhibit remarkable stability against population bias due to long-range correlations, challenging the claims of prior research. In this paper, we study the…
We investigate cosmological consequences of an extended gravity model which belongs to the same class studied by Accetta and Steinhardt in an extended inflationary scenario. But we do not worry about inflation in our model; instead, we…
Axions have for some time been considered a plausible candidate for dark matter. They can be produced through misalignment, but it has been argued that when inflation occurs before a Peccei-Quinn transition, appreciable production can…
We propose two novel solutions to the domain wall problem of the QCD axion by introducing a massless or light axion that also couples to gluons. The first solution applies when the new axion forms strings after inflation. Due to its mixing…
The clockwork axion refers to a family of aligned multi-axion models that lead to an exponential hierarchy between the scale of Peccei-Quinn symmetry breaking and the scale of the axion decay constant. The clockworking can bring the…
We investigate the cosmology of an axion that is fundamentally non-compact. During inflation, fluctuations of the effectively massless field populate many QCD vacua, thereby evading conventional isocurvature constraints while generating…
Axion dark matter in high-scale inflation is subject to the isocurvature constraint, since quantum fluctuations of the axion field during inflation may exceed the current CMB bound. One conventional way to suppress these fluctuations is to…
We point out that domain wall formation is a more common phenomenon in the Axiverse than previously thought. Level crossing could take place if there is a mixing between axions, and if some of the axions acquire a non-zero mass through…
It is shown that the post-inflationary quantum chromodynamics (QCD) axion need not lead to a unique one-parameter prediction for the dark matter abundance whenever small explicit Peccei-Quinn symmetry breaking becomes dynamically relevant…