3 papers
hep-ph2025
Stacking the Deck: Gambling on a Light QCD Axion
Abhishek Banerjee, Manuel A. Buen-Abad, Anson Hook
We consider axions lighter than what their QCD couplings might otherwise suggest. Starting with a -axion, we introduce a small explicit symmetry-breaki…
hep-ph2025
Ultralight Dilatonic Dark Matter
Abhishek Banerjee, Csaba Csáki, Michael Geller +2
The dilaton, a pseudo-Nambu-Goldstone boson (pNGB) of broken scale invariance, is an appealing ultralight dark matter (DM) candidate. Its mass is protected by conformal invariance…
hep-ph2024
Dynamical Axion Misalignment from the Witten Effect
Abhishek Banerjee, Manuel A. Buen-Abad
We propose a relaxation mechanism for the initial misalignment angle of the pre-inflationary QCD axion with a large decay constant. The proposal addresses the challenges posed to t…