Related papers: Heavy QCD Axion at Belle II: Displaced and Prompt …
Within the realm of QCD sum rules, one of the most important areas of application of this nonperturbative approach is the prediction of the decay constants of heavy mesons. However, in spite of the fact that, indisputably, the adopted…
Axionlike particles (ALPs) can be produced in meson decays via tree-level quark-flavor-violating couplings, and decay to a pair of sterile neutrinos if also coupled to them. Such light sterile neutrinos are necessarily long-lived and may…
Detection of axion dark matter heavier than a meV is hindered by its small wavelength, which limits the useful volume of traditional experiments. This problem can be avoided by directly detecting in-medium excitations, whose $\sim…
In the minimal $U(1)$ extension of the Standard Model (SM), a new gauge boson referred to as "dark photon" is predicted. The dark-photon mass can be generated from an additional Higgs mechanism associated with a dark scalar boson. At…
We present a search for the direct production of a light pseudoscalar $a$ decaying into two photons with the Belle II detector at the SuperKEKB collider. We search for the process ${e^+e^-\to\gamma a, a \to\gamma\gamma}$ in the mass range…
Second-generation theoretical technologies -- heavy quark expansions, QCD sum rules and QCD simulations on the lattice -- are arriving on the scene, allowing a treatment of charm decays that is genuinely based on QCD. The availability of…
Within the SM, the yet unmeasured $\tau^-\to\pi^-\eta^{(\prime)}\nu_\tau$ decays are predicted as a suppressed, isospin-violating effect with branching ratios $\lesssim\mathcal{O}(10^{-5})$. However, they can also proceed through other…
We present a sum-rule extraction of the decay constants of the D, Ds, B, and Bs mesons from the two-point correlator of heavy-light pseudoscalar currents [1]. Our main emphasis is laid on the control over the uncertainties in the decay…
In the framework where the strong coupling is dynamical, the QCD sector may confine at a much higher temperature than it would in the Standard Model, and the temperature-dependent mass of the QCD axion evolves in a non-trivial way. We find…
Axions arising as modes of higher-dimensional gauge fields are known to offer a compelling solution to the axion quality problem and to naturally arise in string theory. In this context, it is interesting to ask how we would interpret an…
This document presents a selection of QCD studies accessible to high-precision studies with hadronic final states in $e^+e^-$ collisions at Belle II. The exceptionally clean environment and the state-of-the-art capabilities of the Belle~II…
The QCD axion is one of the best motivated dark matter candidates. The misalignment mechanism is well known to produce an abundance of the QCD axion consistent with dark matter for an axion decay constant of order $10^{12}$ GeV. For a…
The recently proposed dark dimension scenario reveals that axions can be localized on the Standard Model brane, thereby predicting the quantum chromodynamics (QCD) axion decay constant from the Weak Gravity Conjecture: $f_a\lesssim M_5 \sim…
The dark dimension scenario, which is motivated from Swampland principles and predicts a single micron scale extra dimension, suggests a consistent framework for the dark sector of the universe. We consider the implications of this scenario…
The mass of the axion and its decay rate are known to depend only on the scale of Peccei-Quinn symmetry breaking, which is constrained by astrophysics and cosmology to be between $10^9$ and $10^{12}$ GeV. We propose a new mechanism such…
An interesting proposal suggests that a QCD axion $(a)$ coupling to the up quark, down quark, and electron remains viable for an axion mass near 10~MeV. In this paper, this possibility is reexamined by deriving new bounds from kaon decays.…
Axions arise in many theoretical extensions of the Standard Model of particle physics, in particular the "string axiverse". If the axion masses, $m_a$, and (effective) decay constants, $f_a$, lie in specific ranges, then axions contribute…
Several theoretical motivations point to ultralight QCD axions with large decay constants $f_a \simeq \mathcal{O}(10^{16}-10^{17})$ GeV, to which experimental proposals are dedicated. This regime is known to face the problem of…
Current techniques cannot detect axion dark matter over much of its parameter space, particularly in the theoretically well-motivated region where the axion decay constant f_a lies near the GUT and Planck scales. We suggest a novel…
We study charged lepton flavor violation associated with a light leptophilic axion-like particle (ALP), $X$, at the $B$-factory experiment Belle II. We focus on production of the ALP in the tau decays $\tau \to X l$ with $l=e,\mu$, followed…