Related papers: QCD $\theta$-vacuum energy and axion properties
The effect of perturbative QCD interactions on the high energy scattering of electroweak vector bosons, when the exchanged channel has pion quantum numbers, is considered. The chiral anomaly is shown to appear in the couplings of particular…
We study the $\theta$-vacuum of QCD using two-flavor chiral perturbation theory ($\chi$PT) in the presence of a uniform, background magnetic field calculating the magnetic field-dependent free energy density, the topological density, the…
We calculate the $\theta$ dependence in a cousin of QCD, where the vacuum structure can be analyzed exactly. The theory is $\mathcal{N}=2$ $SU(2)$ gauge theory with $N_F=0,1,2,3$ flavors of fundamentals, explicitly broken to $\mathcal{N}=1$…
The topological structure of vacuum is the cornerstone of non-Abelian gauge theories describing strong and electroweak interactions within the standard model of particle physics. However, transitions between different topological sectors of…
This paper addresses two aspects concerning the $\theta$-vacuum of Quantum Chromodynamics. First, large-$N_c$ chiral perturbation theory is used to calculate the first two non-trivial cumulants of the distribution of the winding number,…
We show how several properties of the QCD axion can be extracted at high precision using only first principle QCD computations. By combining NLO results obtained in chiral perturbation theory with recent Lattice QCD results the full axion…
We demonstrate that the observed cosmological excess of matter over antimatter may originate from a heavy QCD axion that solves the strong CP problem but has a mass much larger than that given by the Standard Model QCD strong dynamics. We…
Oscillations of photons into axion-like particles in a high-intensity laser field are investigated. Nonlinear QED effects are considered through the low energy behavior of the vacuum polarization tensor, which is derived from the…
These lecture notes provide a self-contained, graduate-level introduction to the strong $CP$ problem and QCD axion physics from an effective field theory (EFT) viewpoint. We review the construction of the chiral EFT of QCD yielding a…
The role of the quark condensate for the low energy structure of QCD is discussed in some detail. In particular, the dependence of M_pi on m_u and m_d and the low energy theorems for the pi-pi scattering amplitude are reviewed. The new data…
Using the effective potential approach for composite operators we have formulated the quantum model of the QCD vacuum. It is based on the existence and importance of the nonperturbative $q^{-4}$-type dynamical, topologically nontrivial…
Chiral condensate and $\eta^\prime$ meson mass spectrum are studied under the influence of an external Abelian magnetic field. We work within the D3/D7 Karch--Katz model of flavoured AdS/CFT with supersymmetry broken by the Constable--Myers…
We consider chiral symmetry breaking through nontrivial vacuum structure with an explicit construct for the vacuum with quark antiquark condensates in QCD with Coulomb gauge for different phenomenological potentials. The dimensional…
The Chiral Quark-Soliton Model of nucleons is based on two ideas: 1) the major role of spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking in hadron physics and 2) the relevance of the large number of colours limit for the real world. In these lectures I…
We argue that the axion arising in the solution of the strong CP problem can be identified with the Majoron, the (pseudo-)Goldstone boson of spontaneously broken lepton number symmetry. At low energies, the associated $U(1)_L$ becomes, via…
We show how the properties of the QCD axion change in systems at finite baryonic density, such as neutron stars. At nuclear saturation densities, where corrections can be reliably computed, we find a mild reduction of the axion mass and up…
We investigate the impact of the CP-violating $\theta$ term on isospin symmetry breaking in quark matter and compact star properties using a two-flavor Nambu-Jona-Lasinio (NJL) model. By incorporating the $\theta$ parameter through the…
The lectures review some of the basic concepts relevant for an understanding of the low energy properties of the strong interactions: chiral symmetry, spontaneous symmetry breakdown, Goldstone bosons, quark condensate. The effective field…
We consider the scattering of two color dipoles (e.g., heavy quarkonium states) at low energy - a QCD analog of Van der Waals interaction. Even though the couplings of the dipoles to the gluon field can be described in perturbation theory,…
Using the trace anomaly relation, low-energy theorem and Witten-Veneziano formula, we have developed an analytical formalism which allows one to calculate the gluon condensate, the topological susceptibility and the mass of the $\eta'$…