How light can ALP dark matter be?

Abstract We assume axion-like particles (ALPs) to provide the full dark matter abundance and derive various lower bounds on the ALP mass. We contrast the post- and pre-inflationary symmetry breaking cases and present allowed regions in the plane of ALP mass and energy scale of inflation. For the post-inflationary case, we revisit bounds from isocurvature perturbations taking into account that, as suggested by simulations, axion radiation by cosmic strings during the scaling regime provides the dominant production mechanism of dark matter, obtaining significantly weaker limits than previously. Combining isocurvature, with constraints from black hole superradiance and free streaming, we find that the bound m a ≳ 10 -17 eV applies for most cases considered here. It can be potentially relaxed to ∼ 6 × 10 -19 eV only in the post-inflationary case with a strongly temperature-dependent axion mass, subject to uncertainties on the axion emission spectrum. Significantly stronger bounds are obtained in the post-inflationary scenario from the non-observation of CMB tensor modes, which can be as strong as m a > 5 × 10 -7 eV for small reheating efficiencies, ϵ ≲ 5 × 10 -4 .