Related papers: Mass Mixing between QCD Axions
We study the cosmological evolution of the QCD axion coupled to hidden photons. For a moderately strong coupling, the motion of the axion field leads to an explosive production of hidden photons by tachyonic instability. We use lattice…
One intriguing BSM particle is the QCD axion, which could simultaneously provide a solution to the Strong CP problem and account for some, if not all, of the dark matter density in the universe. This particle is a pNGB of the conjectured…
I revisit the phase structure of hot and dense matter out of quarks and gluons with some historical consideration on the color deconfinement and chiral phase transitions. My goal is to make clear which part of the QCD phase diagram is under…
The interaction between the dark/mirror sector and the ordinary sector is considered, where the two sectors interact with each other by sharing the same QCD axion field. This feature makes the mixing between ordinary and dark/mirror photons…
We examine the first-order cosmological QCD phase transition for a large class of parameter values, previously considered unlikely. We find that the hadron bubbles can nucleate at very large distance scales, they can grow as detonations as…
I review recent developments in determining the QCD phase diagram by means of lattice simulations. Since the invention of methods to side-step the sign problem a few years ago, a number of additional variants have been proposed, and…
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…
We analyze the effect of primordial density perturbations on the cosmic QCD phase transition. According to our results hadron bubbles nucleate at the cold perturbations. We call this mechanism inhomogeneous nucleation. We find the typical…
We present numerical results for the location of the chiral critical line at finite temperature and zero and non-zero baryon density for QCD with N_f=2+1 flavours of staggered fermions on lattices with temporal extent N_t=4. For degenerate…
The QCD axion is a well-motivated hypothetical particle beyond the Standard Model (SM) and a compelling dark matter candidate. Its relic abundance is highly sensitive to the thermal history of the universe when the temperature is around the…
The QCD axion remains experimentally viable in the mass range of O(10 MeV) if (i) it couples predominantly to the first generation of SM fermions; (ii) it decays to $e^+ e^-$ with a short lifetime $\tau_a\lesssim 10^{-13}\,$s; and (iii) it…
We recently obtained an estimate of the axion mass based on the hypothesis that axions make up most of the dark matter in the universe. A key ingredient for this calculation was the temperature-dependence of the topological susceptibility…
The QCD phase diagram may feature a critical end point at a temperature T and baryon chemical potential $\mu$ which is accessible in heavy ion collisions. The universal long wavelength fluctuations which develop near this Ising critical…
The modern phase diagram of strongly interacting matter reveals a rich structure at high-densities due to phase transitions related to the chiral symmetry of quantum chromodynamics (QCD) and the phenomenon of color superconductivity. These…
Here, we propose a novel approach to experimentally and theoretically study the properties of QCD matter under new extreme conditions, namely having an initial temperature over 300~MeV and baryonic charge density over three times the values…
The QCD axion is one of the best motivated dark matter candidates. The misalignment mechanism is well known to produce an abundance of the QCD axion consistent with dark matter for an axion decay constant of order $10^{12}$ GeV. For a…
In a progress toward searching for the QCD critical point, we study the finite density phase transition of $N_f = 4$ and 2 lattice QCD at finite temperature with the canonical ensemble approach. We develop a winding number expansion method…
The finite temperature phase transition of strongly interacting matter is studied within a nonlocal chiral quark model of the NJL type coupled to a Polyakov loop. In contrast to previous investigations which were restricted to the…
We present a detailed calculation of the transition temperature in QCD with two light and one heavier (strange) quark mass on lattices with temporal extent N_t =4 and 6. Calculations with improved staggered fermions have been performed for…
Mean-field model quantum field theories of hadrons were traditionally developed to describe cold and dense nuclear matter and are by now very well constrained from the recent neutron star merger observations. We show that when augmented…