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Fan J, Fraser K, Reece M, Stout J. Axion Mass from Magnetic Monopole Loops. PHYSICAL REVIEW LETTERS 2021; 127:131602. [PMID: 34623866 DOI: 10.1103/physrevlett.127.131602] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 07/12/2021] [Accepted: 08/19/2021] [Indexed: 06/13/2023]
Abstract
We show that axions interacting with Abelian gauge fields obtain a potential from loops of magnetic monopoles. This is a consequence of the Witten effect: the axion field causes the monopoles to acquire an electric charge and alters their energy spectrum. The axion potential can also be understood as a type of instanton effect due to a Euclidean monopole worldline winding around its dyon collective coordinate. We calculate this effect, which has features in common with both non-Abelian instantons and Euclidean brane instantons. To provide consistency checks, we argue that this axion potential vanishes in the presence of a massless charged fermion and that it is robust against the presence of higher-derivative corrections in the effective Lagrangian. Finally, as a first step toward connecting with particle phenomenology and cosmology, we discuss the regime in which this potential is important in determining the dark matter relic abundance in a hidden sector containing an Abelian gauge group, monopoles, and axions.
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Affiliation(s)
- JiJi Fan
- Department of Physics & Brown Theoretical Physics Center, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island 02912, USA
| | - Katherine Fraser
- Department of Physics, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA
| | - Matthew Reece
- Department of Physics, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA
| | - John Stout
- Department of Physics, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA
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Greljo A, Opferkuch T, Stefanek BA. Gravitational Imprints of Flavor Hierarchies. PHYSICAL REVIEW LETTERS 2020; 124:171802. [PMID: 32412299 DOI: 10.1103/physrevlett.124.171802] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 10/14/2019] [Accepted: 04/16/2020] [Indexed: 06/11/2023]
Abstract
The mass hierarchy among the three generations of quarks and charged leptons is one of the greatest mysteries in particle physics. In various flavor models, the origin of this phenomenon is attributed to a series of hierarchical spontaneous symmetry breakings, most of which are beyond the reach of particle colliders. We point out that the observation of a multipeaked stochastic gravitational wave signal from a series of cosmological phase transitions could well be a unique probe of the mechanism behind flavor hierarchies. To illustrate this point, we show how near future ground- and space-based gravitational wave observatories could detect up to three peaks in the recently proposed PS^{3} model.
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Affiliation(s)
- Admir Greljo
- Theoretical Physics Department, CERN, 1211 Geneva, Switzerland
| | - Toby Opferkuch
- Theoretical Physics Department, CERN, 1211 Geneva, Switzerland
| | - Ben A Stefanek
- PRISMA Cluster of Excellence and Mainz Institute for Theoretical Physics, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, 55099 Mainz, Germany
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Heidenreich B, Reece M, Rudelius T. Emergence of Weak Coupling at Large Distance in Quantum Gravity. PHYSICAL REVIEW LETTERS 2018; 121:051601. [PMID: 30118300 DOI: 10.1103/physrevlett.121.051601] [Citation(s) in RCA: 5] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.8] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 03/09/2018] [Indexed: 06/08/2023]
Abstract
The Ooguri-Vafa swampland conjectures claim that in any consistent theory of quantum gravity, when venturing to large distances in scalar field space, a tower of particles will become light at a rate that is exponential in the field-space distance. We provide a novel viewpoint on this claim: If we assume that a tower of states becomes light near a particular point in field space, and we further demand that loop corrections drive both gravity and the scalar to strong coupling at a common energy scale, then the requirement that the particles become light exponentially fast in the field-space distance in Planck units follows automatically. Furthermore, the same assumption of a common strong-coupling scale for scalar fields and gravitons implies that, when a scalar field evolves over a super-Planckian distance, the average particle mass changes by an amount of the order of the cutoff energy. This supports earlier suggestions that significantly super-Planckian excursions in field space cannot be described within a single effective field theory. We comment on the relationship of our results to the weak gravity conjecture.
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Affiliation(s)
- Ben Heidenreich
- Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 2Y5
| | - Matthew Reece
- Department of Physics, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA
| | - Tom Rudelius
- School of Natural Sciences, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey 08540, USA
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Kaloper N, Kleban M, Lawrence A, Sloth MS. Large field inflation and gravitational entropy. Int J Clin Exp Med 2016. [DOI: 10.1103/physrevd.93.043510] [Citation(s) in RCA: 16] [Impact Index Per Article: 2.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 11/07/2022]
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Price LC. Power spectrum oscillations from Planck-suppressed operators in effective field theory motivated monodromy inflation. Int J Clin Exp Med 2015. [DOI: 10.1103/physrevd.92.103507] [Citation(s) in RCA: 3] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 11/07/2022]
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de la Fuente A, Saraswat P, Sundrum R. Natural inflation and quantum gravity. PHYSICAL REVIEW LETTERS 2015; 114:151303. [PMID: 25933305 DOI: 10.1103/physrevlett.114.151303] [Citation(s) in RCA: 4] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.4] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 01/30/2015] [Indexed: 06/04/2023]
Abstract
Cosmic inflation provides an attractive framework for understanding the early Universe and the cosmic microwave background. It can readily involve energies close to the scale at which quantum gravity effects become important. General considerations of black hole quantum mechanics suggest nontrivial constraints on any effective field theory model of inflation that emerges as a low-energy limit of quantum gravity, in particular, the constraint of the weak gravity conjecture. We show that higher-dimensional gauge and gravitational dynamics can elegantly satisfy these constraints and lead to a viable, theoretically controlled and predictive class of natural inflation models.
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Affiliation(s)
- Anton de la Fuente
- Department of Physics, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742, USA
| | - Prashant Saraswat
- Department of Physics, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742, USA
- Department of Physics and Astronomy, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland 21218, USA
| | - Raman Sundrum
- Department of Physics, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742, USA
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Ben-Dayan I, Pedro FG, Westphal A. Hierarchical axion inflation. PHYSICAL REVIEW LETTERS 2014; 113:261301. [PMID: 25615300 DOI: 10.1103/physrevlett.113.261301] [Citation(s) in RCA: 2] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.2] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 07/18/2014] [Indexed: 06/04/2023]
Abstract
We propose a new field theory mechanism for generating an effective trans-Planckian decay constant from sub-Planckian ones. Using the minimal two axions and a hierarchy between two axion decay constants is sufficient for realizing inflation through nonperturbative effects only and with minimal tuning. The inflationary motion is kept entirely within a sub-Planckian domain. We outline possible strategies of embedding the model in a string theory setup.
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Affiliation(s)
- Ido Ben-Dayan
- Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron DESY, Theory Group, D-22603 Hamburg, Germany
| | - Francisco Gil Pedro
- Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron DESY, Theory Group, D-22603 Hamburg, Germany
| | - Alexander Westphal
- Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron DESY, Theory Group, D-22603 Hamburg, Germany
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Csáki C, Kaloper N, Serra J, Terning J. Inflation from broken scale invariance. PHYSICAL REVIEW LETTERS 2014; 113:161302. [PMID: 25361247 DOI: 10.1103/physrevlett.113.161302] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 07/08/2014] [Indexed: 06/04/2023]
Abstract
We construct a model of inflation based on a low-energy effective theory of spontaneously broken global scale invariance. This provides a shift symmetry that protects the inflaton potential from quantum corrections. Since the underlying scale invariance is noncompact, arbitrarily large inflaton field displacements are readily allowed in the low-energy effective theory. A weak breaking of scale invariance by almost marginal operators provides a nontrivial inflaton minimum, which sets and stabilizes the final low-energy value of the Planck scale. The underlying scale invariance ensures that the slow-roll approximation remains valid over large inflaton displacements, and yields a scale invariant spectrum of perturbations, as required by the cosmic microwave background observations.
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Affiliation(s)
- Csaba Csáki
- Department of Physics, LEPP, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York 14853, USA
| | - Nemanja Kaloper
- Department of Physics, University of California, Davis, California 95616, USA
| | - Javi Serra
- Department of Physics, LEPP, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York 14853, USA
| | - John Terning
- Department of Physics, University of California, Davis, California 95616, USA
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Creminelli P, López Nacir D, Simonović M, Trevisan G, Zaldarriaga M. ϕ(2) or not ϕ(2): testing the simplest inflationary potential. PHYSICAL REVIEW LETTERS 2014; 112:241303. [PMID: 24996081 DOI: 10.1103/physrevlett.112.241303] [Citation(s) in RCA: 2] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.2] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 04/14/2014] [Indexed: 06/03/2023]
Abstract
The simplest inflationary model V=1/2m(2)ϕ(2) represents the benchmark for future constraints. For a quadratic potential, the quantity (n(s)-1)+r/4+11(n(s)-1)(2)/24 vanishes (up to corrections which are cubic in slow roll) and can be used to parametrize small deviations from the minimal scenario. Future constraints on this quantity will be able to distinguish a quadratic potential from a pseudo-Nambu-Goldstone boson with f≲30M(pl) and set limits on the deviation from unity of the speed of sound |c(s)-1|≲3×10(-2) (corresponding to an energy scale Λ≳2×10(16) GeV) and on the contribution of a second field to perturbations (≲6×10(-2)). The limiting factor for these bounds will be the uncertainty on the spectral index. The error on the number of e-folds will be ΔN≃0.4, corresponding to an error on the reheating temperature ΔT(rh)/T(rh)≃1.2. We comment on the relevance of non-Gaussianity after BICEP2 results.
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Affiliation(s)
- Paolo Creminelli
- Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics, Strada Costiera 11, 34151 Trieste, Italy and Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey 08540, USA
| | - Diana López Nacir
- Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics, Strada Costiera 11, 34151 Trieste, Italy and Departamento de Física and IFIBA, FCEyN UBA, Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales, Ciudad Universitaria, Pabellón I, 1428 Buenos Aires, Argentina
| | - Marko Simonović
- SISSA, via Bonomea 265, 34136 Trieste, Italy and Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare, Sezione di Trieste, I-34136 Trieste, Italy
| | - Gabriele Trevisan
- SISSA, via Bonomea 265, 34136 Trieste, Italy and Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare, Sezione di Trieste, I-34136 Trieste, Italy
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Kaloper N, Sorbo L. A natural framework for chaotic inflation. PHYSICAL REVIEW LETTERS 2009; 102:121301. [PMID: 19392263 DOI: 10.1103/physrevlett.102.121301] [Citation(s) in RCA: 14] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.9] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 11/24/2008] [Indexed: 05/27/2023]
Abstract
We show that inflation with a quadratic potential occurs naturally in theories where an axionlike field mixes with a 4-form. Such an axion is massive, with the mass which arises from the mixing being protected by the axion shift symmetry. The 4-form backgrounds break this symmetry spontaneously and comprise a minilandscape, where their fluxes can change by emission of membranes. Inflation can begin when the 4-form dominates the energy density. Eventually, this energy is reduced by membrane emission, and the axion can roll slowly towards its minimum, as in the simplest version of chaotic inflation.
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Affiliation(s)
- Nemanja Kaloper
- Department of Physics, University of California, Davis, California 95616, USA
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Choi K. QCD axion from a higher dimensional gauge field theory. PHYSICAL REVIEW LETTERS 2004; 92:101602. [PMID: 15089193 DOI: 10.1103/physrevlett.92.101602] [Citation(s) in RCA: 1] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.1] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 08/28/2003] [Indexed: 05/24/2023]
Abstract
We point out that a QCD axion solving the strong CP problem can arise naturally from a parity-odd gauge field in five-dimensional (5D) orbifold field theory. The required axion coupling to the QCD anomaly comes from the 5D Chern-Simons coupling, and all other unwanted U(1)PQ breaking axion couplings can be avoided naturally by the 5D gauge symmetry and locality. If the fifth dimension is warped, the resulting axion scale is suppressed by a small warp factor compared to the Planck scale, thereby the model can generate naturally an intermediate axion scale fa = 10(10)-10(12) GeV.
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Affiliation(s)
- Kiwoon Choi
- Department of Physics, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Daejeon 305-701, Korea.
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