Related papers: Heavy QCD Axion at Belle II: Displaced and Prompt …
We consider light neutralinos of mass about 1 GeV, produced from $\tau$ lepton rare decays at Belle II, in the context of R-parity-violating (RPV) supersymmetry. With large and clean samples of $\tau$ leptons produced at the Belle II…
It is conventionally assumed that the physics underlying the Peccei-Quinn (PQ) mechanism for addressing the strong CP problem is at very high energies, orders of magnitude above the weak scale. However, this may not be the case in general…
The string axion may provide the most attractive solution to the strong CP problem in QCD. However, the axion energy density easily exceeds the dark matter density in the present universe due to a large decay constant around $10^{16}$ GeV,…
We study the cosmological evolution of the QCD axion coupled to hidden photons. For a moderately strong coupling, the motion of the axion field leads to an explosive production of hidden photons by tachyonic instability. We use lattice…
We review searches for closed string axions and axion-like particles (ALPs) in IIB string flux compactifications. For natural values of the background fluxes and TeV scale gravitino mass, the moduli stabilisation mechanism of the LARGE…
We present a search for a non-Standard-Model invisible particle $X^0$ in the mass range $0.1\textrm{-}1.8 \,{\rm GeV}/{c^2}$ in $B^{+}\to e^{+} X^{0}$ and $B^{+}\to \mu^{+} X^{0}$ decays. The results are obtained from a $711~{\rm fb}^{-1}$…
We sketch a recent sum-rule extraction of the decay constants of the heavy pseudoscalar mesons D, D_s, B, and B_s from the two-point correlator of heavy-light pseudoscalar currents [1]. Our main emphasis lies on the control over all the…
Although the axion is the most compelling solution to the strong CP problem, the ad hoc introduced global Peccei-Quinn symmetry suffers from a severe fine-tuning problem known as the quality problem. In this Letter, we show that the…
We report that the hypothesis that the upper bound on the axion decay constant can be moved up beyond $10^{12}$ GeV in models with a stronger QCD in the early universe is not realized. This proof is possible by studying the superpotential…
The QCD axion has been postulated to exist because it solves the strong CP problem. Furthermore, if it exists axions should be created in the early Universe and could account for all the observed dark matter. In particular, axion masses of…
Current upper bounds of the neutron electric dipole moment constrain the physically observable quantum chromodynamic (QCD) vacuum angle $|\bar\theta| \lesssim 10^{-11}$. Since QCD explains vast experimental data from the 100 MeV scale to…
We extend the catalogue of "phenomenologically preferred" hadronic axion models to include heavy fermion representations associated with higher-dimensional decay operators. The latter have recently been shown to self-consistently trigger a…
The inelastic dark matter model is one kind of popular models for the light dark matter (DM) below $O(1)$ GeV. If the mass splitting between DM excited and ground states is small enough, the co-annihilation becomes the dominant channel for…
The recent detection of B-modes by BICEP2 has non-trivial implications for axion dark matter implied by combining the tensor interpretation with isocurvature constraints from Planck. In this paper the measurement is taken as fact, and its…
New physics, that is too heavy to be produced directly, can leave measurable imprints on the tails of kinematic distributions at the LHC. We use energetic QCD processes to perform novel measurements of the Standard Model (SM) Effective…
We analyze the impact of the $\theta$-angle and axion dynamics for two-color (in fact any $Sp(2N)$) QCD at nonzero baryon charge and as a function of the number of matter fields on the vacuum properties, the pattern of chiral symmetry…
A visible improvement of the QCD sum-rule framework, achieved only recently by a slightly more sophisticated consideration of the hadron excitations and continuum, is applied to the extraction of the decay constants of heavy-light…
Theories beyond the standard model often predict the existence of an additional neutral boson, the $Z^{\prime}$. Using data collected by the Belle II experiment during 2018 at the SuperKEKB collider, we perform the first searches for the…
Large numbers of $\tau$ leptons are produced at Belle II. These could potentially decay into sterile neutrinos that, for the mass range under consideration, are typically long-lived, leading to displaced-vertex signatures. Here, we study a…
I describe how the QCD vacuum structure, necessary to resolve the $U(1)_A$ problem, predicts the presence of a P, T and CP violating term proportional to the vacuum angle $\bar{\theta}$. To agree with experimental bounds, however, this…