Related papers: Paper-boat relaxion
Counterintuitively, experiments show that an electromagnetically levitated particle escapes from its trap when the ambient pressure is reduced below a certain level even if the particle's motion is cooled by a resonator-based or…
Generic equilibria are derived for turbulent relaxing plasmas via an entropy-maximization procedure that accounts for the short-time conservation of certain collisionless invariants. The conservation of these collisionless invariants endows…
Extensions of the Standard Model with extra neutral currents due to additional anomalous abelian gauge factors are considered. We summarize the main features of the effective action associated to these theories. They are characterized by an…
We propose a baryogenenesis mechanism that uses a rotating condensate of a Peccei-Quinn (PQ) symmetry breaking field and the dimension-five operator that gives Majorana neutrino masses. The rotation induces charge asymmetries for the Higgs…
It is generally believed that one cannot obtain a large Universe from quantum cosmological models without an inflationary phase in the classical expanding era because the typical size of the Universe after leaving the quantum regime should…
Similar to QCD, general relativity has a $\Theta$ sector due to large diffeomorphisms. We make explicit, for the first time, that the gravitational CP violating $\Theta$ parameter is non-perturbatively related to the cosmological constant.…
The decay constant of the QCD axion is required by observation to be small compared to the Planck scale. In theories of "natural inflation," and certain proposed anthropic solutions of the cosmological constant problem, it would be…
A model of high scale inflation is presented where the radial part of the Peccei-Quinn (PQ) field with a non-minimal coupling to gravity plays the role of the inflaton, and the QCD axion is the dark matter. A quantum fluctuation of…
We investigate the interplay between early universe cosmology and dark matter direct detection, considering axion models with naturally suppressed couplings to photons. In the context of the cosmological relaxation of the electroweak scale,…
The possible existence of an exponentially large number of vacua in string theory behooves one to consider possibilities beyond our traditional notions of naturalness. Such an approach to electroweak physics was recently used in "Split…
In the present paper, we discuss gravitational relaxation models for the electroweak hierarchy problem. We show that modified gravity can naturally relax the electroweak hierarchy problem where conformal transformation provides a crucial…
If the inflaton is a pseudo-scalar axion, the axion shift symmetry can protect the flatness of its potential from too large radiative corrections. This possibility, known as natural inflation, requires an axion scale which is greater than…
We propose a novel paradigm for the QCD axion with high-quality Peccei-Quinn (PQ) symmetry on the basis of electric-magnetic duality in the conformal window of a supersymmetric gauge theory. PQ breaking fields, that contain the QCD axion,…
Many models of dark matter QCD axion requires inflation at a scale $H_{\text{inf}} \lesssim 10^{6}$~GeV and hence does not allow for a detectable tensor mode fluctuation. This is because the domain wall problem forces the Peccei--Quinn…
We study the process of relaxation back to thermal equilibrium in $(1+1)$-dimensional conformal field theory at finite temperature. When the size of the system is much larger than the inverse temperature, perturbations decay exponentially…
The clockwork axion refers to a family of aligned multi-axion models that lead to an exponential hierarchy between the scale of Peccei-Quinn symmetry breaking and the scale of the axion decay constant. The clockworking can bring the…
The Peccei-Quinn (PQ) symmetry does not need to be exact, and even a tiny source of PQ breaking not aligned with the QCD anomaly might have significant phenomenological implications. In this study, we examine the effects of a general class…
Extended QCD (XQCD) proposed by Kaplan [1] is an interesting reformulation of QCD with additional bosonic auxiliary fields. While its partition function is kept exactly the same as that of original QCD, XQCD naturally contains properties of…
The companion-axion model introduces a second QCD axion to rescue the Peccei-Quinn solution to the strong-CP problem from the effects of colored gravitational instantons. As in single-axion models, the two axions predicted by the…
We consider the class of effective supergravity theories from the weakly coupled heterotic string in which local supersymmetry is broken by gaugino condensation in a hidden sector, with dilaton stabilization achieved through corrections to…