Related papers: Can QCD Axions Survive the Cosmological Constant P…
The relaxion scenario presents an intriguing extension of the standard model in which the particle introduced to solve to the strong CP problem, the axion, also achieves the dynamical relaxation of the Higgs boson mass term. In this work we…
The physical origin of the strong CP problem in QCD, rooted in the structures of the vacuum of the standard model, is reviewed. The chiral solution to this problem, with its accompanying axion, is explained and various characteristics of…
Within conventional big bang cosmology, it has proven to be very difficult to understand why today's cosmological constant is so small. In this paper, we show that a cyclic model of the universe can naturally incorporate a dynamical…
Field theory models of axion monodromy have been shown to exhibit vacuum energy sequestering as an emergent phenomenon for cancelling radiative corrections to the cosmological constant. We study one loop corrections to this class of models…
A mechanism for lifting the cosmological upper bound on the axion decay constant, $f_a$, is proposed. It entails the near masslessness of the radial mode whose vacuum expectation value is $f_a$. Energy in the coherent oscillations of the…
One often hears that the strong $CP$ problem is the one problem which cannot be solved by anthropic reasoning. We argue that this is not so. Due to nonperturbative dynamics, states with a different $CP$ violating paramenter $\theta$ acquire…
A new mechanism of adjustment of vacuum energy down to the observed value from an initially huge one is considered. The mechanism is based on a very strong variation of the gravitational coupling constant in very early universe. The model…
It is suggested that the true ground state of the world has exactly vanishing vacuum energy and that the cosmological constant that seems to have been observed is due to our region of the universe being stuck in a false vacuum, whose energy…
We study gravitational properties of vacuum energy by erecting a geometry on the stress-energy tensor of vacuum, matter and radiation. Postulating that the gravitational effects of matter and radiation can be formulated by an appropriate…
We demonstrate that the observed cosmological excess of matter over antimatter may originate from a heavy QCD axion that solves the strong CP problem but has a mass much larger than that given by the Standard Model QCD strong dynamics. We…
We construct a class of 4D `yoga' (naturally relaxed) models for which the gravitational response of heavy-particle vacuum energies is strongly suppressed. The models contain three ingredients: (i) a relaxation mechanism, (ii) a very…
In order to deal with a large cosmological constant a relaxation mechanism based on modified gravity has been proposed recently. By virtue of this mechanism the effect of the vacuum energy density of a given quantum field/string theory (no…
We study cosmological solutions of (pseudo)scalar theories with periodic potentials, in the presence of arbitrary cosmological fluids -- including a cosmological constant of either sign. Independently of the initial misalignment angle and…
Possible analogies between vacuum state and quantum fluid provide a model to study vacuum energy density induced by thermal corrections, space-time curvature, boundary conditions and quantum back-reaction. We find that vacuum energy density…
Linear axion monodromy models modulated with higher powers of fields naturally realize the quantum-mechanical flux discharge mechanism for relaxing the cosmological constant toward zero. Working with multiple copies of superposed linear and…
We present an approach to the problem of vacuum energy in cosmology, based on dynamical screening of Lambda on the horizon scale. We review first the physical basis of vacuum energy as a phenomenon connected with macroscopic boundary…
In implementations of the electroweak scale cosmological relaxation mechanism proposed so far, the effect of the quantum fluctuations of the homogeneous relaxion field has been ignored. We show that they can grow during the classical…
We examine the necessity of requiring that relaxion dynamics is dominated by classical slow roll and not quantum fluctuations. It has been recently proposed by Nelson and Prescod-Weinstein that abandoning this requirement can lead to a…
We show that relaxion, that addresses the hierarchy problem, can account for the observed dark matter (DM) relic density. The setup is similar to the case of axion DM models topped with a dynamical misalignment mechanism. After the…
In this work we suggest, without detailed mathematical analysis, a hypothesis on the physical meaning of cosmological constant. It is primarily based on a conceptual analogy with energy characteristics of the crystal lattice structure, i.e.…