https://doi.org/10.1140/epjp/s13360-023-03877-7
Regular Article
The cosmological axion dark matter decay
Department of Science and Environmental Studies, The Education University of Hong Kong, Tai Po, New Territories, Hong Kong, China
Received:
20
June
2022
Accepted:
2
March
2023
Published online:
27
March
2023
It has been shown that the axions produced in early universe can account for the cosmological dark matter. Theoretically, axions can decay and their decay rate can be greatly enhanced by stimulated emission of photons. In this article, we present a theoretical framework to describe the decay of the cosmological axion dark matter. We show that, for a certain parameter space of axion mass 
and the axion–photon coupling constant 
, the axion decay would be significantly triggered so that no axion dark matter remains. For the popular benchmark models of the cosmological axion dark matter 
eV, current observational constraints of the axion–photon coupling constant can ensure that axions are stable enough to be the cosmological dark matter.
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© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Società Italiana di Fisica and Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2023. Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
