Related papers: A non-compact QCD axion
In the scenario in which QCD axion dark matter is produced after inflation, the Universe is populated by large inhomogeneities on very small scales. Eventually, these fluctuations will collapse gravitationally to form dense axion…
The $(3+1)$-dimensional evolution of an inhomogeneous axion field configuration around the QCD epoch is studied numerically, including important non-linear effects due to the attractive self-interaction. It is found that axion perturbations…
The QCD axion solving the strong CP problem may originate from antisymmetric tensor gauge fields in compactified string theory, with a decay constant around the GUT scale. Such possibility appears to be ruled out now by the detection of…
We study for what specific values of the theoretical parameters the axion can form the totality of cold dark matter. We examine the allowed axion parameter region in the light of recent data collected by the WMAP5 mission plus baryon…
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 spectator axion-gauge sector, minimally coupled to the inflaton, with the axion experiencing a momentary stage of fast roll during cosmological inflation, can generate unique signatures in primordial density fluctuations and the…
We propose a minimal extension of the standard model which includes only one additional complex scalar field, flavon, with flavor-dependent global U(1) symmetry. It not only explains the hierarchical flavor structure in the quark and lepton…
Recently there has been interest in the physical properties of dark matter axion condensates. Due to gravitational attraction and self-interactions, they can organize into spatial localized clumps, whose properties were examined by us in…
Models that produce Axion-Like-Particles (ALP) after cosmological inflation due to spontaneous $U(1)$ symmetry breaking also produce cosmic string networks. Those axionic strings lose energy through gravitational wave emission during the…
We develop methods for resummation of instanton lattice series. Using these tools, we investigate the consequences of the Weak Gravity Conjecture for large-field axion inflation. We find that the Sublattice Weak Gravity Conjecture implies a…
The highly populated, low-energy excitations of a scalar field of mass $m_a\sim 10^{-22}\,\textrm{eV}$ can represent the full dark matter content of the universe and alleviate some tensions in the standard cosmological scenario on…
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…
We study collisions between nearly planar domain walls including the effects of small initial nonplanar fluctuations. These perturbations represent the small fluctuations that must exist in a quantum treatment of the problem. In a previous…
We revisit inflationary cosmology of axion models in the light of recent developments on the inflaton decay in supergravity. We find that all the cosmological difficulties, including gravitino, axino overproduction and axionic isocurvature…
We present a new mechanism to relax the initial misalignment angle of the QCD axion and raise the cosmological bound on the axion decay constant. The QCD axion receives a contribution from small UV instantons during inflation, which raises…
In a modest attempt to present potentially new paradigms in Cosmology, including its inflationary epoch, and initiate discussions, I review in this article some novel, string-inspired cosmological models, which entail a purely geometrical…
Axions are among the best motivated dark matter candidates. Their production in the early Universe by the vacuum misalignment mechanism gives rise to isocurvature perturbations, which are constrained by cosmic microwave background…
The abundance of the QCD axion is known to be suppressed if the Hubble parameter during inflation, $H_{\rm inf}$, is lower than the QCD scale, and if the inflation lasts sufficiently long. We show that the tight upper bound on the inflation…
We study the small scale structure of axion dark matter in the post-inflationary scenario, which predicts the formation of low-mass, high-density clumps of gravitationally bound axions called axion miniclusters. To this end, we follow…
In ordinary QCD with light, degenerate, fundamental flavors, $CP$ symmetry is spontaneously broken at $\theta=\pi$, and domain wall solutions connecting the vacua can be constructed in chiral perturbation theory. In some cases the breaking…