Reconciling axion quality with post-inflation cosmology
Abstract
We address the axion quality/cosmology tension that often plagues QCD axion models in post-inflationary Peccei-Quinn (PQ) breaking scenarios. In the proposed framework, the PQ symmetry emerges accidentally from an SU(π©)LΓSU(π©)R gauge symmetry spontaneously broken to SU(π©)L+R, and its quality is protected because PQ breaking first appears at operator dimension π©. Moreover, the construction avoids the domain-wall problem, ensures that no stable fractionally charged relic survives SU (π©)L+R confinement, and remains free of Landau poles below the scale of PQ-breaking operators. The exotic quarks required to generate the PQ anomaly hadronize into unstable mesons and cosmologically stable neutral baryons. However, plausible arguments indicating a strong suppression of baryon formation in SU(π©) gauge theories at large π©, suggest that their contribution to the dark matter energy density remains subdominant. Combining cosmological constraints with PQ quality and perturbativity requirements yields a viable parameter space in which the axion makes up most of the dark matter and its mass remains predictable.
Related
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BibTeX
@misc{luzio2026reconciling,
title = {{Reconciling axion quality with post-inflation cosmology}},
author = {Luca Di Luzio and Samuele Di Valeriano and Marco Nardecchia and Enrico Nardi},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.16110},
eprint = {2609.16110},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.16110},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Reconciling axion quality with post-inflation cosmology
AU - Luca Di Luzio
AU - Samuele Di Valeriano
AU - Marco Nardecchia
AU - Enrico Nardi
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/14
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.16110
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.16110
AB - We address the axion quality/cosmology tension that often plagues QCD axion models in post-inflationary Peccei-Quinn (PQ) breaking scenarios. In the proposed framework, the PQ symmetry emerges accidentally from an SU(π©)_LΓSU(π©)_R gauge symmetry spontaneously broken to SU(π©)_L+R, and its quality is protected because PQ breaking first appears at operator dimension π©. Moreover, the construction avoids the domain-wall problem, ensures that no stable fractionally charged relic survives SU (π©)_L+R confinement, and remains free of Landau poles below the scale of PQ-breaking operators. The exotic quarks required to generate the PQ anomaly hadronize into unstable mesons and cosmologically stable neutral baryons. However, plausible arguments indicating a strong suppression of baryon formation in SU(π©) gauge theories at large π©, suggest that their contribution to the dark matter energy density remains subdominant. Combining cosmological constraints with PQ quality and perturbativity requirements yields a viable parameter space in which the axion makes up most of the dark matter and its mass remains predictable.
ER -