Speaker
Description
It is well known that axion couplings to gauge fields feature rich phenomenology on multiple fronts such as parity violating gravitational waves, primordial black holes, primordial magnetogenesis and leptogenesis. Additionally, the case of axions and non-Abelian gauge field couplings has attracted considerable attention in recent years both from the perspective of “warm inflation” where the gauge field perturbations make up a thermal bath as well as “cold inflation” as in chromo-natural inflation. In spite of the considerable progress in the field, there is much more to discover ahead. This presentation will primarily focus on novel aspects of axion and non-Abelian gauge field dynamics in the strong backreaction regime. Moreover, the issue of thermalization due to the self interactions of the non-Abelian gauge field will be addressed. Finally, some of the challenges these models face in terms of self-consistency (validity of perturbation theory, nonlinear dynamics etc) will be outlined.
