Related papers: Why $w \ne -1$? Anthropic Selection in a $\Lambda$…
The current Universe is composed by a mixture of relativistic species, baryonic matter, dark matter and dark energy which evolve in a non-trivial way at perturbative level. An advanced description of the cosmological dynamics should include…
We explore the cosmological sensitivity to the amplitude of isocurvature fluctuations that would be caused by axions in the "anthropic window" where the axion decay constant f_a >> 10^12 GeV and the initial misalignment angle Theta_i << 1.…
The misalignment mechanism for axion production depends on the temperature-dependent axion mass. The latter has recently been determined within the interacting instanton liquid model (IILM), and provides for the first time a well-motivated…
Major observational efforts in the coming decade are designed to probe the equation of state of dark energy. Measuring a deviation of the equation-of-state parameter w from -1 would indicate a dark energy that cannot be represented solely…
Current cosmological data puts increasing pressure on models of dark energy in the freezing class, e.g. early dark energy or those with equation of state $w$ substantially different from $-1$. We investigate to what extent data will…
Searches for dark matter decaying into photons constrain its lifetime to be many orders of magnitude larger than the age of the Universe. A corollary statement is that the abundance of any particle that can decay into photons over…
I consider some of the issues we face in trying to understand dark energy. Huge fluctuations in the unknown dark energy equation of state can be hidden in distance data, so I argue that model-independent tests which signal if the…
The current cosmological bound on the invisible axion scale may be avoided in the class of theories in which the gauge coupling constant is determined through the expectation value of some scalar field (e.g. moduli in supergravity and…
We discuss the anthropic principle when applied to the holographic dark energy. We find that if the amplitude of the density fluctution is variable, the holographic dark energy fares better than the cosmological constant. More generally,…
Axions solve the Strong CP Problem and are a cold dark matter candidate. The combined constraints from accelerator searches, stellar evolution limits and cosmology suggest that the axion mass is in the range $3 \cdot 10^{-3} > m_a >…
The Abnormally Weighting Energy (AWE) hypothesis consists of assuming that the dark sector of cosmology violates the weak equivalence principle (WEP) on cosmological scales, which implies a violation of the strong equivalence principle for…
A phenomenological model of dark energy that tracks the baryonic and cold dark matter at early times but resembles a cosmological constant at late times is explored. In the transition between these two regimes, the dark energy density drops…
There is a strong possibility that the particles making up the dark matter in the Universe have a mass below 1 eV and in many important situations exhibit a wave-like behavior. Amongst the candidates the axion stands out as particularly…
The properties of axions that constitute 100% of cold dark matter (CDM) depend on the tensor-to-scalar ratio $r$ at the end of inflation. If $r=0.20^{+0.07}_{-0.05}$ as reported by the BICEP2 collaboration, then "half" of the CDM axion…
In this paper, we investigate the process in which axion dark matter undergoes thermal friction, resulting in energy injection into dark radiation, with the aim of mitigating the Hubble tension and large-scale structure tension. In the…
This paper is concerned with string cosmology and the dynamics of multiple scalar fields in potentials that can become negative, and their features as (Early) Dark Energy models. Our point of departure is the "String Axiverse", a scenario…
Properties of Braneworld models of dark energy are reviewed. Braneworld models admit the following interesting possibilities: (i) The effective equation of state can be w < -1 as well as w > -1. In the former case the expansion of the…
Selection effects in cosmology are often invoked to "explain" why some of the fundamental constant of Nature, and in particular the cosmological constant, take on the value they do in our Universe. We briefly review this probabilistic…
The extragalactic background light (EBL) is comprised of the cumulative radiation from all galaxies and active galactic nuclei over the cosmic history. In addition to point sources, EBL also contains information from diffuse sources of…
In this work we perform some studies related to dark energy. Firstly, we propose a dynamical approach to explain the dark energy content of the universe. We assume that a massless scalar field couples to the Hubble parameter with some…