Axion dark matter from topological defects

By M. Kawasaki, K. Saikawa, Toyokazu Sekiguchi. 2014

304 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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 matter of the universe. The previous estimations of the cold dark matter abundance are updated and refined based on the field-theoretic simulations with improved grid sizes. The possible uncertainties originated in the numerical calculations are also discussed. It is found that axions can be responsible for the cold dark matter in the mass range $m_a=(0.8-1.3)\times 10^{-4}\mathrm{eV}$ for the models with the domain wall number $N_{\rm DW}=1$, and $m_a\approx\mathcal{O}(10^{-4}-10^{-2})\mathrm{eV}$ with a mild tuning of parameters for the models with $N_{\rm DW}>1$. Such higher mass ranges can be probed in future experimental studies.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1b9daae3cb251ad7ae4495e24d1c7bfad8d4e91e

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Citations in the corpus

Stellar recipes for axion hunters (2017, background): “The collapse of long-lived domain walls produces an additional number of axions, that contribute to and can be the dominant component of the dark matter density [77, 83].”
Physics potential of the International Axion Observatory (IAXO) (2019, methodology): “The results of the simulations also show that the mean energy of axions produced from strings is comparable to the Hubble scale at the production time, and takes a value of O(1) [136, 139].”
TASI Lectures on the Strong CP Problem and Axions (2018, background): “One can also make lower- fa dark matter axions using topological defects and fine tuning [95, 126, 127, 128].”
A Review of Gravitational Waves from Cosmic Domain Walls (2017, background): “However, it turned out that such a parameter region is excluded since the abundance of cold axions produced by long-lived domain walls exceeds the observed cold dark matter abundance [47,48].”
Early seeds of axion miniclusters (2018, methodology): “• mA = 115± 25μeV [63], • mA = 26.”
Primordial gravitational waves, precisely: the role of thermodynamics in the Standard Model (2018, background): “The number of axions produced via the realignment mechanism and/or the decay of topological defects is fixed at the epoch of the QCD crossover [116], and the resulting abundance is subjected to the uncertainty in the equation of state as well as that in the topological susceptibility [64].”
The landscape of QCD axion models (2020, methodology): “[270] are larger by a factor of order ten.”
The QCD axion, precisely (2015, unknown): “[67]).”
Flaxion: a minimal extension to solve puzzles in the standard model (2016, background): “2) × 1010 GeV [88] and hence there can be a variety of cosmological scenarios.”
Standard Model—axion—seesaw—Higgs portal inflation. Five problems of particle physics and cosmology solved in one stroke (2016, background): “The axion mass range gets extended to larger masses, up to the meV range [40,85], if one considers, as in Ref.”