On the viability of the QCD axion - dark energy transition

This conference thesis summarizes my presentation at Tartu Tuorla Cosmology meeting based on a collaborative work with E.Nardi and C.Smarra \cite{Muursepp:2024mbb}. It is well known that a pseudo-Nambu Goldstone boson (pNGB) coupled to a confining gauge group obtains a non-zero contribution to its mass through instanton effects. At non-zero temperature, this manifests in temperature-dependent mass $m^2(T)\propto T^{-n}$. If these particles come to dominate the energy density of the Universe in the non-relativistic regime they would accelerate the expansion of the Universe for $n>2$, thus providing a dark energy (DE) component. In this work, we outline a scenario in which a pNGB ${\phi }_b$ presently undergoing confinement could realize such a scenario. Using energetic considerations we find that ${\phi }_b$ alone is not enough to produce the experimentally observed amount of DE. However, coupling ${\phi }_b$ to the QCD axion ${\phi }_a$ allows the transfer of energy from the QCD axion to the pNGB via non-adiabatic level-crossing thus reproducing the observed amount of dark matter (DM) and DE.