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.