The recent detection of the cosmic microwave background polarimeter experiment BICEP2 of tensor fluctuations in the B-mode power spectrum basically excludes all plausible axion models where its decay constant is above $10^{13}$ GeV. Moreover, there a
re strong theoretical, astrophysical, and cosmological motivations for models involving, in addition to the axion, also axion-like particles (ALPs), with decay constants in the intermediate scale range, between $10^9$ GeV and $10^{13}$ GeV. Here, we present a general analysis of models with an axion and further ALPs and derive bounds on the relative size of the axion and ALP photon (and electron) coupling. We discuss what we can learn from measurements of the axion and ALP photon couplings about the fundamental parameters of the underlying ultraviolet completion of the theory. For the latter we consider extensions of the Standard Model in which the axion and the ALP(s) appear as pseudo Nambu-Goldstone bosons from the breaking of global chiral $U(1)$ (Peccei-Quinn (PQ)) symmetries, occuring accidentally as low energy remnants from exact discrete symmetries. In such models, the axion and the further ALP are protected from disastrous explicit symmetry breaking effects due to Planck-scale suppressed operators. The scenarios considered exploit heavy right handed neutrinos getting their mass via PQ symmetry breaking and thus explain the small mass of the active neutrinos via a seesaw relation between the electroweak and an intermediate PQ symmetry breaking scale. We show some models that can accommodate simultaneously an axion dark matter candidate, an ALP explaining the anomalous transparency of the universe for $gamma$-rays, and an ALP explaining the recently reported 3.55 keV gamma line from galaxies and clusters of galaxies, if the respective decay constants are of intermediate scale.
Light pseudoscalars, or axion like particles (ALPs), are much studied due to their potential relevance to the fields of particle physics, astrophysics and cosmology. The most relevant coupling of ALPs from the viewpoint of current experimental search
es is to the photon: in this work, we study the generation of this coupling as an effect of quantum corrections, originated from an underlying Lorentz violating background. Most interestingly, we show that the interaction so generated turns out to be Lorentz invariant, thus mimicking the standard ALPs coupling to the photon that is considered in the experiments. This consideration implies that violations of spacetime symmetries, much studied as possible consequences of physics in very high energy scales, might infiltrate in other realms of physics in unsuspected ways. Additionally, we conjecture that a similar mechanism can also generate Lorentz invariant couplings involving scalar particles and photons, playing a possible role in the phenomenology of Higgs bosons.
We propose a simple extension of the electroweak standard model based on the discrete $S_3$ symmetry that is capable of realizing a nearly minimal Fritzsch-type texture for the Dirac mass matrices of both charged leptons and neutrinos. This is achiev
ed with the aid of additional $Z_5$ and $Z_3$ symmetries, one of which can be embedded in $U(1)_{B-L}$. Five complex scalar singlet fields are introduced in addition to the SM with right-handed neutrinos. Although more general, the modified texture of the model retains the successful features of the minimal texture without fine-tuning; namely, it accommodates the masses and mixing of the leptonic sector and relates the emergence of large leptonic mixing angles with the seesaw mechanism. For large deviations of the minimal texture, both quasidegenerate spectrum or inverted hierarchy are allowed for neutrino masses.
