I have a paper out with my advisor, Peter Graham:
journal link (Physical Review D)
In a sentence: Really light QCD axions don’t have to be fine-tuned; you can avoid overclosure naturally if inflation is long enough and slow enough.
This went up on arXiv in May and was published in PRD last week. In the meantime, I’ve given talks on it at two conferences: the Patras Axion-WIMP at DESY in Hamburg*, and IDM (Identification of Dark Matter) at my alma mater, Brown University.
Talk slides (IDM edition): PDF, PPT
The PPT version has a cute animation, which I left out of the PDF because my laptop can’t display PDF animations anyway.
If you’re curious about my work but aren’t a specialist in axion dark matter, let me know and maybe I’ll write a post explaining all of this with less jargon 🙂
*If you’re ever in Hamburg, check out the gardens (Planten un Blomen) and the model train museum (Miniatur Wunderland). And DESY, of course.
Adam Scherlis 