Related papers: Axion string cosmology and its controversies
The existence of a scaling evolution for cosmic string loops in an expanding universe is demonstrated for the first time by means of numerical simulations. In contrast with what is usually assumed, this result does not rely on any…
Relic thermal axions could play the role of an extra hot dark matter component in cosmological structure formation theories. By combining the most recent observational data we improve previous cosmological bounds on the axion mass m_a in…
We discuss the decay of axion walls bounded by strings and present numerical simulations of the decay process. In these simulations, the decay happens immediately, in a time scale of order the light travel time, and the average energy of…
Cosmic strings are a type of cosmic defect formed by a symmetry-breaking phase transition in the early universe. Individual strings would have gathered to build a network, and their dynamical motion would induce scalar--, vector-- and…
Axions arising as modes of higher-dimensional gauge fields are known to offer a compelling solution to the axion quality problem and to naturally arise in string theory. In this context, it is interesting to ask how we would interpret an…
Loops formed from a cosmic string network at early times would act as seeds for early formation of halos, which would form galaxies and lead to early reionization. With reasonable guesses about astrophysical and string parameters, the…
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…
In this talk, I review briefly a scenario for the evolution of a string-inspired cosmological model, in which condensates of primordial gravitational waves (GW), formed at the very early eras after the Big Bang, are considered responsible…
If the symmetry breaking inducing the axion occurs after the inflation, the large axion isocurvature perturbations can arise due to a different axion amplitude in each causally disconnected patch. This causes the enhancement of the…
We study the cosmological evolution of domain walls bounded by strings which arise naturally in axion models. If we introduce a bias in the potential, walls become metastable and finally disappear. We perform two dimensional lattice…
We describe a numerical simulation of the evolution of an $S_3$ cosmic string network which takes fully into account the non-commutative nature of the cosmic string fluxes and the topological obstructions which hinder strings from moving…
We study the possibility that the axion Peccei-Quinn symmetry is spontaneously broken after the beginning of inflation. This scenario interpolates between pre-inflationary and post-inflationary axion cosmology with significant…
Saxino decay can generate significant cosmological entropy, and hence dilute theoretical estimates of the present mass density of a given particle species. The dilution factor depends on the saxino and axion masses, and is constrained by…
If the symmetry breaking leading to the origin of the axion dark matter field occurs after the end of inflation and is never restored, then overdensities in the axion field collapse to form dense objects known in the literature as axion…
A brief discussion is presented assessing the achievements and challenges of string phenomenology: the subfield dedicated to study the potential for string theory to make contact with particle physics and cosmology. Building from the well…
Low energy string theory predicts the existence of an axion field which can lead to cosmic birefringence. We solve the electromagnetic wave equations in the presence of such an axion and a dilaton field in order to determine their effect on…
The cosmological (upper) limit on the Peccei-Quinn constant, related to the primordial oscillations of the axion field, can be relaxed for a mirror axion model. The simple reason is that the mirror world is colder and so the behavior of the…
The QCD axion can successfully solve the strong CP problem under the condition that the Peccei-Quinn symmetry is respected to extremely high standard. We explore a class of gauge theories that accommodate a high-quality axion, known as the…
We compute fermion quantum corrections to the energy of cosmic strings. A number of rather technical tools is needed to formulate this correction and we employ isospin and gauge invariance to verify consistency of these tools. These…
If inflation occurs after the breaking of Peccei-Quinn symmetry then large values of the breaking scale $F$, which are forbidden in conventional axion cosmology, are permitted, provided that we inhabit a region of the Multiverse where the…