Related papers: Cosmological Implications of Radiatively Generated…
We investigate the impact of finite temperature effects on axions in the context of cosmology. The temperature dependence of the decay constant is modeled analogous to pions. For the two interesting cases considered here, we find that the…
We estimate the cosmological abundance of a modulus field that has dilatonic couplings to gauge fields, paying particular attention to thermal corrections on the modulus potential. We find that a certain amount of the modulus coherent…
We study in detail the dynamics of a scalar field in thermal bath with symmetry breaking potential. In particular, we focus on the process of trapping of a scalar field at an enhanced symmetry point through the thermal/non-thermal particle…
The simplest explanation for early time acceleration (inflation) and the late time acceleration indicated by recent data is that they have a common origin. We investigate another generic cosmological implication of this possiblity, that the…
Axions play a central role in many realizations of large field models of inflation and in recent alternative mechanisms for generating primordial tensor modes in small field models. If these axions couple to gauge fields, the coupling…
The coupling of an axion-like particle driving inflation to the Standard Model particle content through a Chern-Simons term generically sources a dual production of massless helical gauge fields and chiral fermions. We demonstrate that the…
We briefly discuss constraints on supersymmetric hybrid inflation models and examine the consistency of brane inflation models. We then address the implications for inflationary scenarios resulting from the strong constraints on the cosmic…
Cosmological moduli generically come to dominate the energy density of the early universe, and thereby trigger an early matter dominated era. Such non-standard cosmological histories are expected to have profound effects on the evolution…
Axion inflation entails a coupling of the inflaton field to gauge fields through the Chern-Simons term. This results in a strong gauge field production during inflation, which backreacts on the inflaton equation of motion. Here we show that…
We present a toy model of an axion gauge field inflation scenario that yields viable density and gravitational wave spectra. The scenario consists of an axionic inflaton in a steep potential that is effectively flattened by a coupling to a…
Axion rotations can simultaneously explain the dark matter abundance and the baryon asymmetry of the Universe by kinetic misalignment and axiogenesis. We consider a scenario in which the Peccei-Quinn symmetry breaking field is as large as…
Although the standard {\Lambda}CDM model describes the cosmic microwave background radiation and the large scale structure of the Universe with great success, it has some tensions with observations in the effective number of neutrino…
Using the techniques of out-of-equilibrium field theory, we study the influence on the properties of cosmological perturbations generated during inflation on observable scales coming from fluctuations corresponding today to scales much…
In all supersymmetric theories, gravitinos, with mass suppressed by the Planck scale, are an obvious candidate for dark matter; but if gravitinos ever reached thermal equilibrium, such dark matter is apparently either too abundant or too…
We study the sensitivity of cosmological observables to the reheating phase following inflation driven by many scalar fields. We describe a method which allows semi-analytic treatment of the impact of perturbative reheating on cosmological…
It is usually assumed that dark matter is produced during the radiation dominated era. There is, however, no direct evidence for radiation domination prior to big-bang nucleosynthesis. Two non-standard thermal histories are considered. In…
We study the cosmology of supersymmetric models in which the supersymmetry breaking effects are mediated by gauge interactions at about the 10^5 GeV scale. We first point out that the gravitino is likely to overclose the Universe in this…
Axions and other light particles appear ubiquitously in physics beyond the Standard Model, with a variety of possible couplings to ordinary matter. Cosmology offers a unique probe of these particles as they can thermalize in the hot…
We investigate cosmological aspects of spontaneous baryogenesis driven by a scalar field, and present general constraints that are independent of the particle physics model. The relevant constraints are obtained by studying the backreaction…
If the inflaton is a pseudo-scalar axion, the axion shift symmetry can protect the flatness of its potential from too large radiative corrections. This possibility, known as natural inflation, requires an axion scale which is greater than…