Non-Axion Strong CP Solutions with AMSB QCD

by Dr Taewook Youn (Cornell University)

Thursday 19 Jun 2025, 13:30 → 14:30 Europe/Zurich

4/2-037 - TH meeting room (CERN)

We explore non-axion solutions to the strong CP problem that leverage the dynamics of strongly coupled sectors and anomaly mediated supersymmetry breaking (AMSB). In the first part, we consider models where CP is spontaneously broken solely by the chiral condensate of a hidden strong sector, leading to natural suppression of the QCD $\bar\theta$ angle without introducing axions. This setup also yields dark pions as viable dark matter candidates, with relic abundance produced via freeze-in for a wide range of CP breaking scales, $10^{10}$–$10^{13}$ GeV. In the second part, we investigate the possibility of a dynamically generated up quark mass in QCD-like theories with $F=3$ light flavors and AMSB-induced supersymmetry breaking. We compute the up quark mass to next-to-leading order in chiral perturbation theory, varying the number of colors $N$. Notably, for $F=N$, the up quark mass receives an ${\cal O}(1)$ contribution, which could account for its entire physical value.