{"paper":{"title":"Natural Phantom Dark Energy from a $\\mathbb{Z}_N$--Axion","license":"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":["astro-ph.CO"],"primary_cat":"hep-ph","authors_text":"Admir Greljo, C\\'edric Delaunay","submitted_at":"2026-07-07T20:11:01Z","abstract_excerpt":"We present a technically natural microscopic realization of apparent phantom dark energy based on an axion coupled to $N$ copies of two-flavor dark QCD related by a $\\mathbb{Z}_N$ exchange symmetry. The symmetry exponentially suppresses the axion vacuum potential, naturally generating the dark-energy scale, while reheating into a single dark sector induces a controlled breaking of $\\mathbb{Z}_N$ that simultaneously restores the physical axion periodicity, sets the dark-matter abundance, and drives the late-time dark-energy dynamics. The selected sector contains dark-pion dark matter, whose fin"},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2607.06774","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/2607.06774/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"}