Speaker: David Kaplan (University of Washington, Seattle) 
Title:   Axions, the Anthropic Principle, and the Tilted Universe

Abstract:

The axion is a light, weakly interacting particle that is a consequence 
of the Peccei-Quinn solution to the strong CP problem,  proposed in the 
late 1970's.  The story of the axion is like A Thousand and One Nights, 
digressing its way throughout particle physics, astrophysics and cosmology.  
I discuss this story, including more recent developments, and explain how 
one might detect the presence of an axion cosmic string a million times 
farther away from Earth than our present horizon.