Related papers: Cosmological Consequences of String Axions
I review a string-inspired cosmological model, with gravitational anomalies present at very early epochs, which includes a totally antisymmetric torsion, that in (3+1)-dimensions is equivalent to a pseudoscalar (Kalb-Ramond, string-model…
Temperature anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background offers a test of the fundamental symmetry of spacetime during cosmic inflation. Violation of rotational symmetry yields a distinct signature in the power spectrum of primordial…
We study minimal versions of Higgs inflation in the presence of a massless QCD axion. While the inflationary energy scale of the metric variant is too high to accommodate isocurvature bounds, it was argued that Palatini Higgs inflation…
We investigate the cosmology of an axion that is fundamentally non-compact. During inflation, fluctuations of the effectively massless field populate many QCD vacua, thereby evading conventional isocurvature constraints while generating…
The cosmic string theory for cosmological fluctuations is a good example of healthy scientific progress in cosmology. It is a well defined physically motivated model that has been tested by cosmological observations and has been ruled out…
1. Introduction 2. Models: the QCD axion; the strong CP problem; PQWW, KSVZ, DFSZ; anomalies, instantons and the potential; couplings; axions in string theory 3. Production and I.C.'s: SSB and non-perturbative physics; the axion field…
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…
We investigate the axion inflation model derived by poly-instanton effects in type II superstring theories. Poly-instanton effects are instanton effects corrected by another instanton and it can generate the modulus-axion potential with the…
We study aspects of inflation and the possibility of enhanced production of primordial black holes (PBHs) and gravitational waves (GWs) in a string-inspired model of two axion fields coupled to Chern-Simons gravity, which results in a…
In this paper, we consider a possibility that the temperature anisotropy of cosmic microwave background (CMB) is dominantly generated by the primordial fluctuations of QCD-axion like particles under a circumstance that inflaton's…
We study effects of the cosmic string in the D-term inflation model on the cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy. In the D-term inflation model, gauged cosmic string is usually formed, which may significantly affect the CMB…
A class of well-motivated models of inflation end by producing cosmic strings. The current status of efforts to calculate and observe the signals from such models are outlined, with a particular emphasis on cosmic strings, and on the Cosmic…
The latest Planck results show a power deficit in the temperature anisotropies near $\ell \approx 20$ in the cosmic microwave background (CMB). This observation can hardly be explained within the standard inflationary…
We consider the presence of an axion like particle, $\sigma$, with a generic $CP$ violating axial coupling of the form $ (\alpha \, \sigma/f) F \tilde{F}$, where $F_{\mu\nu}$ is the gauge field strength of a generic abelian $U(1)$ gauge…
We study cosmological gravitational waves generated during inflation under the influence of a decaying cosmological "constant", in the Transverse-Traceless (TT) gauge. In our approach we consider a non-perturbative contribution of the…
The leading candidate for the very early universe is described by a period of rapid expansion known as inflation. While the standard paradigm invokes a single slow-rolling field, many different models may be constructed which fit the…
The QCD axion in the pre-inflation scenario faces a stringent isocurvature constraint, which requires a relatively low Hubble scale during inflation. If the axion was heavier than the Hubble scale during inflation, its isocurvature is…
We consider the impact of thermal inflation -- a short, secondary period of inflation that can arise in supersymmetric scenarios -- on the stochastic gravitational wave background. We show that while the primordial inflationary…
The network of cosmic strings generated in a phase transition during inflation enters the scaling regime later than that of usual strings. If it occurs after the recombination, temperature anisotropies of the cosmic microwave background…
Light scalar and pseudoscalar particles are compelling dark matter candidates, with a vast running experimental program to discover them. Previous studies have shown that these light fields can generate sizable isocurvature perturbations in…