No Arabic abstract
New superstrong forces, analogous to QCD but featuring a larger mass scale, should they exist, would offer new possibilities for addressing the strong P, T, problem. One can implement the massless quark solution in a phenomenologically acceptable way, by using a massless quark that is always confined within superheavy particles, and is therefore effectively superheavy: a cryptoquark. Assuming confinement and chiral symmetry breaking from the superstrong dynamics, we find a new mechanism to generate an axion field without introducing new fundamental scalar fields.
Models with spontaneously broken parity symmetry can solve the strong $CP$ problem in a natural way. We construct such a model in the context of $SU3^3$ unification. Parity has the conventional meaning in this model, and the gauge group is unified.
We construct a theory in which the solution to the strong CP problem is an emergent property of the background of the dark matter in the Universe. The role of the axion degree of freedom is played by multi-body collective excitations similar to spin-waves in the medium of the dark matter of the Galactic halo. The dark matter is a vector particle whose low energy interactions with the Standard Model take the form of its spin density coupled to $G widetilde{G}$, which induces a potential on the average spin density inducing it to compensate $overline{theta}$, effectively removing CP violation in the strong sector in regions of the Universe with sufficient dark matter density. We discuss the viable parameter space, finding that light dark matter masses within a few orders of magnitude of the fuzzy limit are preferred, and discuss the associated signals with this type of solution to the strong CP problem.
We show that QCD instantons can generate large effects at small length scales in the ultraviolet in standard composite Higgs models that utilise partial compositeness. This has important implications for possible solutions of the strong CP problem in these models. First we show that in the simplest known UV completions of composite Higgs models, if an axion is also present, it can have a mass much larger than the usual QCD axion. Even more remarkable is the case where there are no axions, but the strong CP problem can be solved by generating the up quark mass entirely from the contribution of instantons thus reviving the massless up-quark solution for these models. In both cases no additional field content is required apart from what is required to realise partial compositeness.
Many meson processes are related to the U_A(1) axial anomaly, present in the Feynman graphs where fermion loops connect axial vertices with vector vertices. However, the coupling of pseudoscalar mesons to quarks does not have to be formulated via axial vertices. The pseudoscalar coupling is also possible, and this approach is especially natural on the level of the quark substructure of hadrons. In this paper we point out the advantages of calculating these processes using (instead of the anomalous graphs) the graphs where axial vertices are replaced by pseudoscalar vertices. We elaborate especially the case of the processes related to the Abelian axial anomaly of QED, but we speculate that it seems possible that effects of the non-Abelian axial anomaly of QCD can be accounted for in an analogous way.
A very light scalar top (stop) superpartner is motivated by naturalness and electroweak baryogenesis. When the mass of the stop is less than the sum of the masses of the top quark and the lightest neutralino superpartner, as well as the of the masses of the lightest chargino and the bottom quark, the dominant decay channels of the stop will be three-body, four-body, or flavour violating. In this work, we investigate the direct and indirect constraints on a light stop, we compute the relative decay branching fractions to these channels, and we study the sensitivity of existing LHC searches to each of them.