Related papers: Dimensionless constants, cosmology and other dark …
Cosmology and astrophysics provide various ways to study the properties of dark matter even if they have negligible non-gravitational interactions with the Standard Model particles and remain hidden. We study a type of hidden dark matter…
The density of dark matter near the Sun is important for experiments hunting for dark matter particles in the laboratory, and for constraining the local shape of the Milky Way's dark matter halo. Estimates to date have typically assumed…
In supersymmetric theories, the Peccei-Quinn symmetry has a complex extension as a symmetry of the superpotential, so that the scalar potential always has an almost flat direction, the dilaton. We discuss how coherent oscillation of the…
Cosmologically long-lived, composite states arise as natural dark matter candidates in theories with a strongly interacting hidden sector at a scale of 10 - 100 TeV. Light axion-like states, with masses in the 1 MeV - 10 GeV range, are also…
Progress in observational cosmology over the past five years has established that the Universe is dominated dynamically by dark matter and dark energy. Both these new and apparently independent forms of matter-energy have properties that…
For nearly 40 years, dark matter has been widely assumed to be cold and collisionless. Cold dark matter models make fundamental predictions for the behavior of dark matter on small (<10 kpc) scales. These predictions include cuspy density…
A range of cosmological observations demonstrate an accelerated expansion of the Universe, and the most likely explanation of this phenomenon is a cosmological constant. Given the importance of understanding the underlying physics, it is…
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…
In this talk I discuss several topics at the interface of particle physics and astrophysics/cosmology. These include the problem of dark matter and two popular dark matter candidates: axions and neutralinos. I also discuss briefly some…
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…
The recent detection of B-modes by BICEP2 has non-trivial implications for axion dark matter implied by combining the tensor interpretation with isocurvature constraints from Planck. In this paper the measurement is taken as fact, and its…
We show that the hybrid inflation is naturally realized in the framework of a supersymmetric axion model, which is consistent with the WMAP observation if the Peccei-Quinn symmetry breaking scale is around 10^{15}GeV. By solving the post…
Although it is well known that any consideration of the variations of fundamental constants should be restricted to their dimensionless combinations, the literature on variations of the gravitational constant $G$ is entirely dimensionful.…
Once dark matter has been discovered and its particle physics properties have been determined, a crucial question rises concerning how it was produced in the early Universe. If its thermally averaged annihilation cross section is in the…
Several lines of evidence suggest that some of the dark matter may be non-baryonic: the non-detection of various plausible baryonic candidates for dark matter inferred, e.g., from galaxy rotation curves and from cluster of galaxy velocity…
We explore the viability of a boson dark matter candidate with an asymmetry between the number densities of particles and antiparticles. A simple thermal field theory analysis confirms that, under certain general conditions, this component…
A mildly inhomogeneous universe with a cosmological constant may look like it contains evolving dark energy. We show that could be the case by modelling the inhomogeneities and their effects in three different ways: as clumped matter…
A consequence of QCD axion dark matter being born after inflation is the emergence of small-scale substructures known as miniclusters. Although miniclusters merge to form minihalos, this intrinsic granularity is expected to remain imprinted…
The dark matter puzzle is one of the most important open problems in modern physics. The ultra-light axion is a well-motivated dark matter candidate, conceived to resolve the strong-CP problem of quantum chromodynamics. Numerous precision…
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 >…