Related papers: Cosmic Axions
If axions exist they are efficiently produced in the hot and dense interior of stars, providing a novel energy-loss mechanism. In order to avoid a conflict with the observed properties of stars, one can derive a lower limit on the…
Generating axion dark matter through the kinetic misalignment mechanism implies the generation of large asymmetries for Standard Model fermions in the early universe. Even if these asymmetries are washed out at later times, they can trigger…
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…
The origin of dark matter in the universe may be weakly interacting scalar particles produced by amplification of quantum fluctuations during a period of dilaton-driven inflation. We present two interesting cases, the case of small…
A generic low-energy prediction of string theory is the existence of a large collection of axions, commonly known as a string axiverse. Axions also have a natural cosmological production mechanism, vacuum misalignment, making them…
The axion arises in well-motivated extensions of the Standard Model of particle physics and is regarded as an alternative to the weakly interacting massive particle paradigm to explain the nature of dark matter. In this contribution, we…
We study the production of cosmological axions in the standard scenario in which a global string network forms at the Peccei-Quinn phase transition. We make detailed calculations of the axions produced by string loops (a previously…
Thermal inflation was proposed as a mechanism to dilute the density of cosmological moduli. Thermal inflation is driven by a complex scalar field possessing a large vacuum expectation value and a very flat potential, called a `flaton'. Such…
Axions and axion-like particles can be generated in the early universe through mechanisms such as misalignment production, thermal processes, and the decay of topological defects. In this study, we show that scalar perturbations in the…
1. Introduction 2. Models: the QCD axion; the strong CP problem; PQWW, KSVZ, DFSZ; anomalies, instantons and the potential; couplings; axions in string theory 3. Production and I.C.'s: SSB and non-perturbative physics; the axion field…
We calculate the production of a massive vector boson by quantum fluctuations during inflation. This gives a novel dark-matter production mechanism quite distinct from misalignment or thermal production. While scalars and tensors are…
Cosmologically stable, light particles that came into thermal contact with the Standard Model in the early universe may persist today as a form of hot dark matter. For relics with masses in the eV range, their role in structure formation…
Dark matter may be coupled to dark radiation: light degrees of freedom that mediate forces between dark sector particles. Cosmological constraints favor dark radiation that is colder than Standard Model radiation. In models with fixed…
We present a new mechanism to deplete the energy density of the QCD axion, making decay constants as high as $f_a \simeq 10^{17}\,\rm{GeV}$ viable for generic initial conditions. In our setup, the axion couples to a massless dark photon…
We present cosmological bounds on the thermal axion mass in an extended cosmological scenario in which the primordial power spectrum of scalar perturbations differs from the usual power-law shape predicted by the simplest inflationary…
We study the system of axion strings that forms in the early Universe if the Peccei-Quinn symmetry is restored after inflation. Using numerical simulations, we establish the existence of an asymptotic solution to which the system is…
We propose simple scenarios where the observed dark matter abundance arises from decays and scatterings of heavy quarks through freeze-in of an axion-like particle with mass in the $10 {\rm \, keV} - 1 {\rm \, MeV}$ range. These models can…
We survey observational constraints on the parameter space of inflation and axions and map out two allowed windows: the classic window and the inflationary anthropic window. The cosmology of the latter is particularly interesting;…
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…
Rotations of an axion field in field space provide a natural origin for an era of kination domination, where the energy density is dominated by the kinetic term of the axion field, preceded by an early era of matter domination. Remarkably,…