Axion Landscapes in Cosmology and String Theory

Abstract: I will review axion landscapes in cosmology and explain their potential for explaining many of the large-scale features of our universe, including the big bang, inflation, dark matter, and dark energy. These explanations can be successful when there are O(100s) of axion fields with random scales and a random charge matrix that is not too sparse. Turning to string theory, I will describe recent work which numerically sampled the landscape of axions potentials in Calabi-Yau compactifications of type IIB. While many of these compactifications admit hundreds of axions, correlations between the scales and charges result in a meager landscape with few unique minima in any given compactification. These results indicate that explaining these features of our universe may require a more general landscape with varying topology or flux.

cosmology and nongalactic astrophysicsgeneral relativity and quantum cosmologyHEP - phenomenologyHEP - theorymathematical physics

Audience: researchers in the discipline

AnLy Strings and Fields online seminars