Journal Club on Strings & QFT: Axion-Gauge Quantization, Dark Sectors, and Generalized Symmetries

by Dr Ethan Torres

Wednesday 18 Oct 2023, 10:00 → 11:30 Europe/Zurich

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

NOTE: The journal club will start with the discussion of interesting arxiv papers from the preceding week, followed by the speaker's presentation.

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Abstract: I will first review two recent papers (one by Choi/Forslund/Lam/Shao and the other by Reece) that derive quantization conditions for axion couplings to Standard Model gauge fields. These conditions may provide experimental probes of the global form of the Standard Model gauge group. Specifically, if one assumes that the Standard Model gauge group is [SU(3)xSU(2)xU(1)]/Z6 and we have a post-inflation QCD axion, then these quantization conditions exclude large regions in the parameter space of axion masses and photon couplings. I will then show how to generalize these results to scenarios where the Standard Model is topologically coupled to a dark sector. Such topological couplings commonly arise when engineering multi-sector QFTs in string theory.