Axion dark matter with explicit Peccei-Quinn symmetry breaking in the axiverse

Abstract

It is shown that the required high quality of the Peccei-Quinn (PQ) symmetry can be a natural outcome of the multiple QCD axion models. In the axiverse, a hypothetical mass mixing between the QCD axions and axion-like particles (ALPs) can occur, which leads to an interesting phenomenon called the level crossing. In this paper, we investigate this mass mixing between one QCD axion and one ALP with the explicit PQ symmetry breaking in the early Universe. The dynamics of the axions and their cosmological evolutions when the level crossing occurs in this scenario are studied in detail. Then we focus our attention on the axion dark matter (DM) abundance. With several typical parameter sets for level crossing, we find that in the presence of the explicit PQ symmetry breaking term in the mixing, the total axion DM abundance is dominated by ALP and significantly suppressed.Comment: 20 pages, 7 figure