Thermal QCD Axions across Thresholds

Thermal axion production in the early universe goes through several mass thresholds, and the resulting rate may change dramatically across them. Focusing on the KSVZ and DFSZ frameworks for the invisible QCD axion, we perform a systematic analysis of thermal production across thresholds and provide smooth results for the rate. The QCD phase transition is an obstacle for both classes of models. For the hadronic KSVZ axion, we also deal with production at temperatures around the mass of the heavy-colored fermion charged under the Peccei-Quinn symmetry. Within the DFSZ framework, standard model fermions are charged under this symmetry, and additional thresholds are the heavy Higgs bosons masses and the electroweak phase transition. We investigate the cosmological implications with a specific focus on axion dark radiation quantified by an effective number of neutrino species and explore the discovery reach of future CMB-S4 surveys.

The hubble tension as a hint of leptogenesis and neutrino mass generation

The majoron, a neutrinophilic pseudo-Goldstone boson conventionally arising in the context of neutrino mass models, can damp neutrino free-streaming and inject additional energy density into neutrinos prior to recombination. The combination of these effects for an eV-scale mass majoron has been shown to ameliorate the outstanding $$H_0$$ H 0 tension, however only if one introduces additional dark radiation at the level of $$\Delta N_{\mathrm{eff}} \sim 0.5$$ Δ N eff ∼ 0.5 . We show here that models of low-scale leptogenesis can naturally source this dark radiation by generating a primordial population of majorons from the decays of GeV-scale sterile neutrinos in the early Universe. Using a posterior predictive distribution conditioned on Planck2018+BAO data, we show that the value of $$H_0$$ H 0 observed by the SH$$_0$$ 0 ES collaboration is expected to occur at the level of $$\sim 10\%$$ ∼ 10 % in the primordial majoron cosmology (to be compared with $$\sim 0.1\%$$ ∼ 0.1 % in the case of $$\Lambda $$ Λ CDM). This insight provides an intriguing connection between the neutrino mass mechanism, the baryon asymmetry of the Universe, and the discrepant measurements of $$H_0$$ H 0 .