{"paper":{"title":"Phenomenology of Inflaton-Driven Early QCD Confinement and Solution to Axion Isocurvature Problem","license":"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":["hep-ph","hep-th"],"primary_cat":"astro-ph.CO","authors_text":"Barmak Shams Es Haghi, Evangelos I. Sfakianakis, Katherine Freese","submitted_at":"2026-06-04T17:58:43Z","abstract_excerpt":"We study the phenomenology of early QCD confinement during inflation, driven by a direct coupling between the inflaton and Standard Model gluons. This coupling dynamically raises the QCD confinement scale, making the axion sufficiently heavy to suppress isocurvature perturbations during the CMB epoch. As inflation proceeds, the confinement scale decreases and the axion becomes light, allowing de Sitter fluctuations during the late stages of inflation or post-inflationary thermal fluctuations to generate the observed dark matter abundance. In addition, QCD-induced corrections to the inflationar"},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2606.06484","kind":"arxiv","version":1},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/2606.06484/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[],"snapshot_sha256":"c28c3603d3b5d939e8dc4c7e95fa8dfce3d595e45f758748cecf8e644a296938"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}