The Relaxion Measure Problem

Abstract

We examine the necessity of requiring that relaxion dynamics is dominated by classical slow roll and not quantum fluctuations. It has been recently proposed by Nelson and Prescod-Weinstein that abandoning this requirement can lead to a unified solution of the hierarchy and strong CP problems in QCD relaxion models. In more general models this results in a higher value of the allowed cut-off. In this work we find, however, that relaxing this condition and can result in the universe being dominated in physical volume by regions arising from large quantum fluctuations of the relaxion. These regions turn out to be problematic for the relaxion mechanism because either the relaxion does not stabilise at all or it stabilises at vacua which cannot reproduce the observed properties of our universe. The size of these undesirable regions is moreover ambiguous because of the measure problem. For instance, we show that if one chooses to use the scale factor cut-off measure such dangerous regions occupy a negligible volume and these issues do not arise.

11 Pages, 1 figure

References in corpus (6)

• Natural inflation with multiple sub-Planckian axions
• Phenomenology of relaxion-Higgs mixing
• Predicting the cosmological constant with the scale-factor cutoff measure
• Properties of the scale factor measure
• The Hierarchion, a Relaxion Addressing the Standard Model's Hierarchies
• Relaxion: A Landscape Without Anthropics

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• Mixing Particle Production for Relaxion Mechanism