1. Axion cosmology, lattice QCD and the dilute instanton gas
- Author
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Borsanyi, S., Dierigl, M., Fodor, Z., Katz, S. D., Mages, S. W., Nogradi, D., Redondo, J., Ringwald, A., and Szabo, K. K.
- Subjects
High Energy Physics - Lattice ,High Energy Physics - Phenomenology - Abstract
Axions are one of the most attractive dark matter candidates. The evolution of their number density in the early universe can be determined by calculating the topological susceptibility $\chi(T)$ of QCD as a function of the temperature. Lattice QCD provides an ab initio technique to carry out such a calculation. A full result needs two ingredients: physical quark masses and a controlled continuum extrapolation from non-vanishing to zero lattice spacings. We determine $\chi(T)$ in the quenched framework (infinitely large quark masses) and extrapolate its values to the continuum limit. The results are compared with the prediction of the dilute instanton gas approximation (DIGA). A nice agreement is found for the temperature dependence, whereas the overall normalization of the DIGA result still differs from the non-perturbative continuum extrapolated lattice results by a factor of order ten. We discuss the consequences of our findings for the prediction of the amount of axion dark matter., Comment: 9 pages, 7 figures
- Published
- 2015
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