TPPC weekly seminar (in-person): Ed Hardy - "Gravitational waves and dark matter substructure from axion strings"

Wednesday 13 Mar 2024, 12:30 → 14:00 Europe/London

Strand Building, S7.06

Speaker: Ed Hardy

Title: Gravitational waves and dark matter substructure from axion strings

Abstract:  If the PQ symmetry that gives rise to an axion is restored after inflation, cosmic strings inevitably form in the early universe. The resulting string network can lead to several phenomenologically and observationally interesting effects including a stocastic gravitational wave background and dark matter substructure. I will show how the properties of both of these can be reliably predicted by combining anaytic and numerical approaches, which leads to results that differ from previous expectations.