Axion hot dark matter bound, reliably [CL]

http://arxiv.org/abs/2101.10330


We show that the commonly adopted hot dark matter (HDM) bound on the axion mass $m_a \lesssim$ 1 eV is not reliable, since it is obtained by extrapolating the chiral expansion in a region where the effective field theory breaks down. This is explicitly shown via the calculation of the axion-pion thermalization rate at the next-to-leading order in chiral perturbation theory. We finally advocate a strategy for a sound extraction of the axion HDM bound via lattice QCD techniques.

Read this paper on arXiv…

L. Luzio, G. Martinelli and G. Piazza
Wed, 27 Jan 21
40/68

Comments: 7 pages, 3 figures