Person

Valerie Fiona Domcke

This person is no longer with EPFL

Related publications (15)

New Constraint on Primordial Lepton Flavor Asymmetries

A chiral chemical potential present in the early Universe can source helical hypermagnetic fields through the chiral plasma instability. If these hypermagnetic fields survive until the electroweak phase transition, they source a contribution to the baryon ...

Amer Physical Soc2023

Cosmological relaxation through the dark axion portal

Valerie Fiona Domcke

The dark axion portal is a coupling of an axion-like particle to a dark photon kinetically mixed with the visible photon. We show how this portal, when applied to the relaxion, can lead to cosmological relaxation of the weak scale using dark photon product ...

Springer Nature2022

Transient phenomena in the axion assisted Schwinger effect

Valerie Fiona Domcke

Particle production induced by a time-dependent background is well understood as the projection of the time-evolved initial state onto a set of final states. While the asymptotic initial and final states are well defined in the usual way, the definition of ...

Springer Nature2022

Novel Search for High-Frequency Gravitational Waves with Low-Mass Axion Haloscopes

Valerie Fiona Domcke

Gravitational waves (GWs) generate oscillating electromagnetic effects in the vicinity of external electric and magnetic fields. We discuss this phenomenon with a particular focus on reinterpreting the results of axion haloscopes based on lumped-element de ...

2022

MeV-scale seesaw and leptogenesis

Marco Drewes, Michele Lucente, Valerie Fiona Domcke

We study the type-I seesaw model with three right-handed neutrinos and Majorana masses below the pion mass. In this mass range, the model parameter space is not only strongly constrained by the requirement to explain the light neutrino masses, but also by ...

Springer Nature2021

Challenges and opportunities of gravitational-wave searches at MHz to GHz frequencies

Daniel Garcia Figueroa, Francisco Torrenti, Valerie Fiona Domcke

The first direct measurement of gravitational waves by the LIGO and Virgo collaborations has opened up new avenues to explore our Universe. This white paper outlines the challenges and gains expected in gravitational-wave searches at frequencies above the ...

SPRINGER INT PUBL AG2021

Stochastic gravitational-wave background from metastable cosmic strings

Valerie Fiona Domcke

A metastable cosmic-string network is a generic consequence of many grand unified theories (GUTs) when combined with cosmic inflation. Metastable cosmic strings are not topologically stable, but decay on cosmic time scales due to pair production of GUT mon ...

IOP Publishing Ltd2021

Axion assisted Schwinger effect

Valerie Fiona Domcke

We point out an enhancement of the pair production rate of charged fermions in a strong electric field in the presence of time dependent classical axion-like background field, which we call axion assisted Schwinger effect. While the standard Schwinger prod ...

Springer Nature2021

Wash-In Leptogenesis

Valerie Fiona Domcke

We present a leptogenesis mechanism based on the standard type-I seesaw model that successfully operates at right-handed-neutrino masses as low as a few hundred TeV. This mechanism, which we dub wash-in leptogenesis, does not require any CP violation in th ...

2021

Potential of Radio Telescopes as High-Frequency Gravitational Wave Detectors

Valerie Fiona Domcke

In the presence of magnetic fields, gravitational waves are converted into photons and vice versa. We demonstrate that this conversion leads to a distortion of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), which can serve as a detector for MHz to GHz gravitationa ...

2021

Spontaneous baryogenesis from axions with generic couplings

Valerie Fiona Domcke

Axion-like particles can source the baryon asymmetry of our Universe through spontaneous baryogenesis. Here we clarify that this is a generic outcome for essentially any coupling of an axion-like particle to the Standard Model, requiring only a non-zero ve ...

Springer Nature2020

From NANOGrav to LIGO with metastable cosmic strings

Valerie Fiona Domcke

We interpret the recent NANOGrav results in terms of a stochastic gravitational wave background from metastable cosmic strings. The observed amplitude of a stochastic signal can be translated into a range for the cosmic string tension and the mass of magne ...

2020

Low-scale leptogenesis with three heavy neutrinos

Marco Drewes, Michele Lucente, Juraj Klaric, Valerie Fiona Domcke

Leptogenesis induced by the oscillations of GeV-scale neutrinos provides a minimal and testable explanation of the baryon asymmetry of the Universe. In this work we extend previous studies invoking only two heavy neutrinos to the case of three heavy neutri ...

Springer Nature2019

Probing non-Gaussian stochastic gravitational wave backgrounds with LISA

Nicola Bartolomei, Daniel Garcia Figueroa, Valerie Fiona Domcke

The stochastic gravitational wave background (SGWB) contains a wealth of information on astrophysical and cosmological processes. A major challenge of upcoming years will be to extract the information contained in this background and to disentangle the con ...

IOP PUBLISHING LTD2018

Hybrid inflation in the complex plane

Kohei Kamada, Valerie Fiona Domcke

Supersymmetric hybrid inflation is an exquisite framework to connect inflationary cosmology to particle physics at the scale of grand unification. Ending in a phase transition associated with spontaneous symmetry breaking, it can naturally explain the gene ...

Iop Publishing Ltd2014