Speaker
Description
Axion-like particles (ALPs) are ubiquitous in models of new physics explaining some of the most
pressing puzzles of the Standard Model. However, until relatively recently, little attention has been
paid to its interplay with flavour. In this work, we study in detail the phenomenology of ALPs
that exclusively interact with up-type quarks at the tree-level, which arise in some well-motivated
ultra-violet completions such as QCD-like dark sectors or Froggatt-Nielsen type models of flavour.
Our study is performed in the low-energy effective theory to highlight the key features of these
scenarios in a model independent way. We derive all the existing constraints on these models and
demonstrate how upcoming experiments at fixed-target facilities and the LHC can probe regions of
the parameter space which are currently not excluded by cosmological and astrophysical bounds. We
also emphasize how a future measurement of the currently unavailable meson decay D → π+invisible
could complement these upcoming searches.
