Axion Dark Matter and Cosmological Parameters

We observe that photon cooling after big bang nucleosynthesis but before recombination can remove the conflict between the observed and theoretically predicted value of the primordial abundance of Li-7. Such cooling is ordinarily difficult to achieve. However, the recent realization that dark matter axions form a Bose-Einstein condensate provides a possible mechanism because the much colder axions may reach thermal contact with the photons. This proposal predicts a high effective number of neutrinos as measured by the cosmic microwave anisotropy spectrum.