Related papers: Is There a Peccei-Quinn Phase Transition?
If the Peccei-Quinn symmetry associated to an axion has ever been restored after inflation, axion strings inevitably produce a contribution to the stochastic gravitational wave background. Combining effective field theory analysis with…
The cosmological scenario where the Peccei-Quinn symmetry is broken after inflation is investigated. In this scenario, topological defects such as strings and domain walls produce a large number of axions, which contribute to the cold dark…
At the first stage of reheating after inflation, parametric resonance may rapidly transfer most of the energy of an inflaton field $\phi$ to the energy of other bosons. We show that quantum fluctuations of scalar and vector fields produced…
We determine the possible trajectories the universe may have followed in the QCD phase diagram during the QCD epoch. We focus on the roles of chiral symmetry breaking and pion condensation under high imbalances in lepton asymmetry. Adopting…
We present a new framework of grand unification that is equipped with an axion solution to the strong CP problem without a domain wall problem when the Peccei-Quinn (PQ) symmetry is spontaneously broken after inflation. Our grand unified…
String and M-theory compactifications generically have compact moduli which can potentially act as the QCD axion. However, as demonstrated here, such a compact modulus can not play the role of a QCD axion and solve the strong CP problem if…
The Peccei-Quinn ($PQ$) mechanism is applied to the $\mathrm{SU(3)_c \otimes SU(3)_L \otimes U(1)_X}$ model with $U(1)_{B-L}$ symmetry. The structures in the $PQ$ charges of all fermions and scalar fields in the model are investigated by…
The prediction of a phase of inflation whose number of e-folds is constrained is an important feature of loop quantum cosmology. This work aims at giving some elementary clarifications on the role of the different hypotheses leading to this…
Because of their quantum fluctuations, axion fields had a chance to experience field excursions traversing many minima of their potentials during inflation. We study this situation by analyzing the dynamics of an axion-spectator field…
We propose a mechanism called axiogenesis where the cosmological excess of baryons over antibaryons is generated from the rotation of the QCD axion. The Peccei-Quinn (PQ) symmetry may be explicitly broken in the early universe, inducing the…
Curvature perturbations generated after the end of inflation are estimated for a generic multi-field inflationary potential. The curvature perturbations are generated by conversion of inflationary isocurvature perturbations, similar to…
Because the inflationary mechanism is extremely sensitive to UV-physics, the construction of theoretically robust models of inflation provides a unique window on Planck-scale physics. We review efforts to use an axion with a shift symmetry…
We consider QCD axion models where the Peccei-Quinn symmetry is badly broken by a larger amount in the past than in the present, in order to avoid the axion isocurvature problem. Specifically we study supersymmetric axion models where the…
We propose a landscape of many axions, where the axion potential receives various contributions from shift symmetry breaking effects. We show that the existence of the axion with a super-Planckian decay constant is very common in the axion…
We reexamine the recently proposed "little inflation" scenario that allows for a strong first order phase-transition of QCD at non-negligible baryon number in the early universe and its possible observable consequences. The scenario is…
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 scale at which supersymmetry is broken and the mechanism by which supersymmetry breaking is fed down to the observable sector has rich implications on the way Nature may have chosen to accomplish inflation. We discuss a simple model for…
Composite axions offer a scenario where the axion emerges as a pion-like state, avoiding fine-tuning of elementary scalars and ameliorating the axion quality problem. Despite these advantages, their post-inflationary cosmology remains…
A semiclassical description of quantum systems is applied to probe the dynamics of the cosmological model of an inflationary universe with quadratic inflaton potential, described in a quantum framework of geometrodynamics. The systematic…
It is assumed in standard cosmology that the Universe underwent a period of inflation in its earliest phase, providing the seeds for structure formation through vacuum fluctuations of the inflaton scalar field. These fluctuations get…