Inflaxion Dark Matter

Understand

A new mechanism for producing axion dark matter is proposed.

• By invoking low-scale inflation and a kinetic mixing between the axion and the inflaton, it is shown that the axion is driven to a field point slightly displaced from the potential minimum, which can give rise to the observed dark matter abundance.
• In this framework, different combinations of the axion and inflaton fields play various cosmological roles, including generating the cosmological perturbations, reheating the universe, and serving as dark matter.
• The kinetic mixing also relates the dark matter lifetime with the reheating temperature.