  A new mechanism for producing axion dark matter is proposed. By invoking
low-scale inflation and a kinetic mixing between the axion and the inflaton, it
is shown that the axion is driven to a field point slightly displaced from the
potential minimum, which can give rise to the observed dark matter abundance.
In this framework, different combinations of the axion and inflaton fields play
various cosmological roles, including generating the cosmological
perturbations, reheating the universe, and serving as dark matter. The kinetic
mixing also relates the dark matter lifetime with the reheating temperature.
The mechanism tames axions that would otherwise overdominate the universe, and
thus opens up new windows in the axion parameter space, including decay
constants at the GUT scale and higher.
