Theoretical Physics Seminar: Axion Monodromy and Dark Matter

by Dr Viraf Mehta (Unviersity of Heidelberg)

Wednesday 22 Feb 2017, 15:00 → 16:00 Europe/Rome

Aula Teorici (Dipartimento di Fisica e Astronomia)

We discuss the effective use of monodromy in enhancing an axion’s maximal potential energy in the context of dark matter. The typical axions used in dark matter models are non-thermally produced via the misalignment mechanism and, due to the periodicity of the potential, have potentials that are bounded from above. This leads to significant constraints on the allowed masses and couplings to visible matter. However, with the introduction of a monodromy, this upper bound may be alleviated significantly and, in this first approach, we discuss the classical and quantum effects that may arise, and their possible cosmological consequences.