Related papers: REMOVING THE COSMOLOGICAL BOUND ON THE AXION SCALE
We revisit a scenario in which the cosmological constant is cancelled by the potential energy of a slowly evolving scalar field, or "cosmon". The cosmon's evolution is tied to the cosmological constant by a feedback mechanism. This feedback…
Cosmic strings in non-abelian gauge theories naturally gain a spectrum of massless, or light, excitations arising from their embedding in color and flavor space. This opens up the possibility that colliding strings miss each other in the…
We consider a dark matter (DM) model offering a very natural explanation of the observed relation, $\Omega_{\rm dark} \sim \Omega_{\rm visible}$. This generic consequence of the model is a result of the common origin of both types of matter…
There has been recent interest in the evolution and cosmological consequences of global axionic string networks, and in particular in the issue of whether or not these networks reach the scale-invariant scaling solution that is known to…
Rolling tachyon field models are among the candidates suggested as explanations for the recent acceleration of the Universe. In these models the field is expected to interact with gauge fields and lead to variations of the fine-structure…
The conventional cosmological perturbation theory has been performed under the assumption that we know the whole spatial region of the universe with infinite volume. This is, however, not the case in the actual observations because…
As a cutoff scale of quantum gravity, the species scale can be defined by the scale at which the perturbativity of the non-renormalizable gravitational interaction begins to break down. Since it is determined by the number of species in the…
Understanding axion cosmology has important experimental consequences since it constrains the range of allowed values for the axion mass. In the standard thermal scenario, which assumes Peccei-Quinn symmetry restoration after inflation, an…
A mechanism for suppressing the cosmological constant is described, using a superconducting analogy in which fermions coupled to gravitons are in an unstable false vauum. The coupling of the fermions to gravitons and a screened attractive…
We investigate the length of the period of validity of a classical description for the cosmic axion field. To this end, we first show that we can understand the oscillating axion solution as expectation value over an underlying coherent…
A strong primordial magnetic field can induce a relaxation of the present bound on the PQ-constant. We show that, considering the present limits on primordial magnetic fields, a value for the PQ-constant very close to the GUT scale is not…
In string/M-theory with a large compactification radius, some axion-like moduli can be much lighter than the gravitino. Generic moduli in gauge-mediated supersymmetry breaking models also have a mass far below the weak scale. Motivated by…
The interplay between cosmology and strongly coupled dynamics can yield transient spectral features that vanish at late times, but which may leave behind phenomenological signatures in the spectrum of primordial fluctuations. Of particular…
We discuss domain walls and vacuum energy density (cosmological constant) in N=1 gluodynamics and in non-supersymmetric large N orientifold field theories which have been recently shown to be planar equivalent (in the boson sector) to N=1…
It is widely believed that string theory easily allows for a QCD axion in the cosmologically favoured mass range. The required small decay constant, $f_a\ll M_P$, can be implemented by using a large compactification volume. This points to…
Requiring all massless elementary fields to have conformal scaling symmetry removes a conflict between gravitational theory and the quantum theory of elementary particles and fields. Extending this postulate to the scalar field of the Higgs…
A global O$(2,2)$ symmetry is found in the Brans-Dicke theory of gravity when the dilaton is coupled to axion and moduli fields. The symmetry is broken if a cosmological constant is introduced. Within the class of spatially homogeneous…
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…
Under the assumption that the cosmological constant vanishes in the true ground state with lowest possible energy density, we argue that the observed small but finite vacuum-like energy density can be explained if we consider a theory with…
We argue, at a very basic effective field theory level, that higher dimension operators in scalar theories that break symmetries at scales close to their ultraviolet completion cutoff, include terms that favour the breaking of translation…