Repercussions of the Peccei-Quinn axion on QCD

Abstract

The axion, originally postulated by Peccei and Quinn to solve the strong CP problem, has become of great interest in particle and astroparticle phenomenology. Yet it has a problem. It is widely assumed that the axion leaves the nonperturbative features of QCD unscathed. This is, however, not the case. On the contrary, the axion extension is found to be in conflict with seminal results on the low-energy properties of QCD. The key is that the anomalous coupling of the axion to the gauge bosons can be integrated out, leaving behind a path integral over topologically trivial gauge potentials.

11 pages, expanded by new findings, including two figures; matches published version

References in corpus (5)

• Measurement of the permanent electric dipole moment of the neutron
• Exploring the structure of the quenched QCD vacuum with overlap fermions
• Topological susceptibility and the sampling of field space in $N_f=2$ lattice QCD simulations
• Instantons and Monopoles
• Topological susceptibility in finite temperature QCD with physical $(u/d,s,c)$ domain-wall quarks

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Absence of strong CP violation