Related papers: Relaxing Axions
A particular compensation-type solution of the main cosmological constant problem has been proposed recently, with two massless vector fields dynamically canceling an arbitrary cosmological constant \Lambda. The naive expectation is that…
We discuss how we remove a huge discrepancy between the theory of a cosmological constant, due to the zero-point energies of matter fields, and the observation. The technique of dimensional regularization plays a decisive role. We…
Within conventional big bang cosmology, it has proven to be very difficult to understand why today's cosmological constant is so small. In this paper, we show that a cyclic model of the universe can naturally incorporate a dynamical…
We consider a higher dimensional gravity theory with a negative kinetic energy scalar field and a cosmological constant. We find that the theory admits an exact cosmological solution for the scale factor of our universe. It has the feature…
We exhibit a novel solution of the strong CP problem, which does not involve any massless particles. The low energy effective Lagrangian of our model involves a discrete spacetime independent axion field which can be thought of as a…
It is shown that a present acceleration with a past deceleration is a possible solution of the Friedmann equation by considering the Universe as a mixture of a scalar with a matter field and by including a non-equilibrium pressure term in…
We consider the backreaction problem of a quantized minimally coupled massless scalar field in cosmology. The adiabatically regularized stress-energy tensor in a general Friedmann-Robertson-Walker background is approximately evaluated by…
We find that the adiabatic fluctuations produced in the primordial plasma by cosmological inflation resonantly excite the axion field during the QCD phase transition by pumping axions from low momentum modes to modes with momentum up to of…
We consider a small, metastable maximum vacuum expectation value $b_0$ of order of a few eV, for a pseudoscalar Goldstone-like field, which is related to the scalar inflaton field $\phi$ in an idealized model of a cosmological,…
We compute the one-loop Casimir energy of gravity and matter fields, obeying various boundary conditions, in 5-dimensional S^1/Z_2 and 6-dimensional T^2/Z_k orbifolds. We discuss the role of the Casimir energy in possible radius…
A model is presented in the philosophy of the "String Axiverse" of Arvanitaki et al (arXiv:0905.4720v2 [hep-th]) that incorporates a coupling of ultralight axions to their corresponding moduli through the mass term. The light fields roll in…
The complex field $\Phi$ containing the QCD axion has a natural portal coupling to the Higgs doublet of the form $\lambda_{h \phi}|\Phi|^2 |H|^2$. Here we consider the possibility that $\lambda_{h \phi}$ has a natural magnitude for a…
If the electroweak Higgs vacuum expectation value $v$ in early universe is $\sim 1 \%$ higher than its present value $v_0=246$ GeV, the $^7$Li puzzle in BBN and the CMB/$\Lambda$CDM tension with late-universe measurements on Hubble…
The proximity of the MOND acceleration constant with cosmological accelerations -- for example, a0 cH0/2pi -- points to its possibly decreasing with cosmic time. I begin to consider the secular changes induced in galactic systems by such…
It follows on general grounds that the theta dependence in QCD is more complicated than suggested by the large N_c approach or instanton arguments. Generically, the vacuum energy E_{vac}(\theta) is a multi-valued function of \theta…
We discuss the threshold anomaly in ultra-high energy cosmic ray physics by assuming that the matter world just be perturbation of a de Sitter universe, which is consistent with the recent astronomical observations: about two thirds of the…
Vacuum energy sequestering is a mechanism for cancelling off the radiative corrections to vacuum energy. The most comprehensive low energy model, proposed in 1606.04958 [hep-th], has the ability to cancel off radiative corrections to vacuum…
Axions with mass greater than 0.7 eV are excluded by cosmological precision data because they provide too much hot dark matter. While for masses above 20 eV the axion lifetime drops below the age of the universe, we show that the…
Bouncing models have been proposed by many authors as a completion, or even as an alternative to inflation for the description of the very early and dense Universe. However, most bouncing models contain a contracting phase from a very large…
Axion fields provide the most elegant solution to the strong CP problem. In string compactifications it is difficult to obtain an axion whose decay constant is consistent with current cosmological bounds. We examine this question in…