Related papers: Semiclassical Gravity and Invisible Axions
The Axion Weak Gravity Conjecture provides one of the most effective quantum gravity tools for constraining particle physics and cosmology, but it has long been thought of as a slightly fuzzy statement: given an axion with decay constant…
The Peccei-Quinn (PQ) mechanism provides an elegant solution to the strong CP problem. However astrophysical constraints on axions require the PQ breaking scale to be far higher than the electroweak scale. In supersymmetric models the PQ…
An heuristic semiclassical procedure that incorporates quantum gravity induced corrections in the description of photons and spin 1/2 fermions is reviewed. Such modifications are calculated in the framework of loop quantum gravity and they…
We investigate the role of gauge and gravitational instantons in the context of the Swampland program. Our focus is on the global symmetry breaking they induce, especially in the presence of fermions. We first recall and make more precise…
The basic idea that gravity can be a long-wavelength effect {\it induced} by the peculiar ground state of an underlying quantum field theory leads to consider the implications of spontaneous symmetry breaking through an elementary scalar…
We show that by introducing appropriate local $Z_N(N\geq13)$ symmetries in electroweak models it is possible to implement an automatic Peccei-Quinn symmetry keeping at the same time the axion protected against gravitational effects.…
Axions are hypothetical pseudoscalar particles introduced initially as a solution to the Strong CP problem in Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD), and they also arise naturally in a broad class of low-energy compactifications of string theory.…
Any canonical quantum theory can be understood to arise from the compatibility of the statistical geometry of distinguishable observations with the canonical Poisson structure of Hamiltonian dynamics. This geometric perspective offers a…
When gauge field theory coherent states for loop quantum gravity (LQG) were introduced, an optimized semiclassical proper length emerged, corresponding to the edge length $\epsilon$ of a graph embedded in a given classical geometry. Here…
We introduce the Anarchic Axion, a class of axion models which solves the Strong CP problem within current nEDM constraints with a lighter than usual QCD axion, thus populating new parameter space that ongoing and future experiments target.…
We show that the minimal Weyl-invariant Einstein-Cartan gravity in combination with the Standard Model of particle physics contains just one extra scalar degree of freedom (in addition to the graviton and the Standard Model fields) with the…
We study a supersymmetric effective field theory in which the mass of an axion-like particle (ALP) is generated predominantly by soft supersymmetry-breaking effects. The Peccei--Quinn symmetry is exact in the supersymmetric limit and is…
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…
It is suggested that charged tachyons of extremely large mass M could not only contribute to the dark matter needed to fit astrophysical observations, but could also provide an explanation for gamma ray bursts and ulta high energy cosmic…
We develop a semiclassical theory of modified gravity with nontrivial spacetime torsion. In particular, we show that the semiclassical treatment can be axiomatized in the case of Einstein--Cartan theory with a nonminimally coupled, free…
We examine the theoretical possibility for the heavy QCD axion to induce slow-roll inflation while solving the strong CP problem through the Peccei-Quinn mechanism. If the cancellation between contributions from a small-size instanton and…
We argue that instantons play a crucial role in triggering the spontaneous breaking of chiral symmetry in the physics of the three light quarks in quantum chromodynamics. However, instantons may also play an essential role in our…
A Peccei-Quinn~(PQ) symmetry is proposed in order to generate in the Standard Model~(SM) quark sector a realistic mass matrix ansatz with five texture-zeros. Limiting our analysis to Hermitian mass matrices, we show that this requires a…
Axions play a central role in inflationary model building and other cosmological applications. This is mainly due to their flat potential, which is protected by a global shift symmetry. However, quantum gravity is known to break global…
Inspired by the possibility of high-scale supersymmetry breaking in the string landscape where the cosmological constant problem and the gauge hierarchy problem can be solved while the strong CP problem is still a challenge for naturalness,…