The topological susceptibility in finite temperature QCD and axion cosmology

We study the topological susceptibility in 2 + 1flavor QCD above the chiral crossover transition temperature using Highly Improved Staggered Quark action and several lattice spacings corresponding to temporal extent of the lattice, N-tau= 6, 8, 10and 12. We observe very distinct temperature dependences of the topological susceptibility in the ranges above and below 250 MeV. While for temperatures above 250 MeV, the dependence is found to be consistent with dilute instanton gas approximation, at lower temperatures the fall-off of topological susceptibility is milder. We discuss the consequence of our results for cosmology wherein we estimate the bounds on the axion decay constant and the oscillation temperature if indeed the QCD axion is a possible dark matter candidate. (C) 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.