Stochastic isocurvature constraints for axion dark matter with high-scale inflation

Abstract: Axions are among the best motivated dark matter candidates. Their production in the early Universe by the vacuum misalignment mechanism gives rise to isocurvature perturbations, which are constrained by cosmic microwave background measurements. In this paper, we compute the axion isocurvature power spectrum using spectral expansion in the stochastic Starobinsky-Yokoyama formalism, which captures non-linear effects in the axion dynamics. In contrast to most of the existing literature, we focus on high inflationary Hubble rates of order $10^{13}~{\rm GeV}$, and demonstrate that there is a significant window in which axions can account for all or part of the dark matter abundance without violating the isocurvature bounds or tensor mode bounds. Crucially, we find that the isocurvature spectrum is dominated by non-perturbative contributions in a large part of this window. Therefore the commonly used linear approximation is not reliable in this region, making the stochastic approach essential.