Related papers: Bubble Misalignment Mechanism for Axions
We use inelastic hard sphere molecular dynamics simulations and laboratory experiments to study patterns in vertically oscillated granular layers. The simulations and experiments reveal that {\em phase bubbles} spontaneously nucleate in the…
Self-oscillations underlie many natural phenomena such as heartbeat, ocean waves, and the pulsation of variable stars. From pendulum clocks to the behavior of animal groups, self-oscillation is one of the keys to the understanding of…
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…
We study a scenario in which the baryon asymmetry of the universe arises from a cosmological phase transition where lepton-number is spontaneously broken. If the phase transition is first order, a lepton-number asymmetry can arise at the…
A generic low-energy prediction of string theory is the existence of a large collection of axions, commonly known as a string axiverse. Axions also have a natural cosmological production mechanism, vacuum misalignment, making them…
We discuss the appearance at the QCD phase transition, and the subsequent decay, of axion walls bounded by strings in N=1 axion models. We argue on intuitive grounds that the main decay mechanism is into barely relativistic axions. We…
In this master's thesis we study the production of axion dark matter through the so-called misalignment mechanism by considering that during that time, the universe was dominated by a new kind of fluid, different than radiation. We perform…
Axions play a central role in many realizations of large field models of inflation and in recent alternative mechanisms for generating primordial tensor modes in small field models. If these axions couple to gauge fields, the coupling…
By coupling axions strongly to a hidden sector, the energy density in coherent axions may be converted to radiative degrees of freedom, alleviating the ``axion energy crisis''. The strong coupling is achieved by mixing the axion and some…
In the presence of an anomalous CP phase in a U(1) gauge theory, a monopole becomes a dyon via the Witten effect. When the anomalous CP phase is promoted to a dynamical field, the axion, the electric charge of the dyon changes according to…
The Peccei-Quinn (PQ) symmetry does not need to be exact, and even a tiny source of PQ breaking not aligned with the QCD anomaly might have significant phenomenological implications. In this study, we examine the effects of a general class…
We study statistical relationships between bubble walls in cosmological first-order phase transitions. We consider the conditional and joint probabilities for different points on the walls to remain uncollided at given times. We use these…
We study the formation of vortices in a U(1) gauge theory following a first-order transition proceeding by bubble nucleation, in particular the effect of a low velocity of expansion of the bubble walls. To do this, we use a two-dimensional…
We show that, in the thin-wall regime, $Q$-ball--anti-$Q$-ball collisions reveal chaotic behaviour. This is explained by the resonant energy transfer mechanism triggered by the internal modes hosted by the $Q$-balls and by the existence of…
We study the viscosity corrections to the growth rate of nucleating bubbles in a first order phase transition in scalar field theory. We obtain the non-equilibrium equation of motion of the coordinate that describes small departures from…
We report a detailed experimental characterization of the periodic bubbling regimes that take place in an axisymmetric air-water jet when the inner air stream is forced by periodic modulations of the pressure at the upstream air feeding…
In the context of an Abelian gauge symmetry, spontaneously broken at a first-order transition, we discuss the evolution of the phase difference between the Higgs fields in colliding bubbles. We show that the effect of dissipation,…
Theories with several hundred axion fields have enormous numbers of distinct meta-stable minima. A small fraction of these local minima have vacuum energy compatible with current measurements of dark energy. The potential also contains…
We study collisions between pairs of bubbles nucleated in an ambient false vacuum. For the first time, we include the effects of small initial (quantum) fluctuations around the instanton profiles describing the most likely initial bubble…
We show that in the presence of large scale primordial hypermagnetic fields, it is possible to generate an axial asymmetry for a first order electroweak phase transition. This happens during the reflection and transmission of fermions off…