Dark Matter in Axion Landscape [CL]

http://arxiv.org/abs/1608.04092


If there are a plethora of axions in nature, they may have a complicated potential and create an axion landscape. We study a possibility that one of the axions is so light that it is cosmologically stable, explaining the observed dark matter density. In particular we focus on a case in which two (or more) shift-symmetry breaking terms conspire to make the axion sufficiently light at the potential minimum. In this case the axion has a flat-bottomed potential. In contrast to the case in which a single cosine term dominates the potential, the axion abundance as well as its isocurvature perturbations are significantly suppressed. This allows an axion with a rather large mass to serve as dark matter without fine-tuning of the initial misalignment, and further makes higher-scale inflation to be consistent with the scenario.

Read this paper on arXiv…

R. Daido, T. Kobayashi and F. Takahashi
Tue, 16 Aug 16
54/57

Comments: 23 pages, 4 figures