UC Berkeley

Axion strings are horizon-size topological defects that may be produced in the early Universe. Ultralight axion-like particles may form strings that persist to temperatures below that of big bang nucleosynthesis. Such strings have been considered previously as sources of gravitational waves and cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarization rotation. In this work we show, through analytic arguments and dedicated adaptive mesh refinement cosmological simulations, that axion strings deposit a subdominant fraction of their energy into high-energy Standard Model (SM) final states, for example, by the direct production of heavy radial modes that subsequently decay to SM particles. This high-energy SM radiation is absorbed by the primordial plasma, leading to novel signatures in precision big bang nucleosynthesis, the CMB power spectrum, and gamma-ray surveys. In particular, we show that CMB power spectrum data constrains axion strings with decay constants fa≲1012  GeV, up to model dependence on the ultraviolet completion, for axion masses ma≲10−29  eV; future CMB surveys could find striking evidence of axion strings with lower decay constants. Published by the American Physical Society 2024