Large field excursions and approximate discrete symmetries from a clockwork axion
By D. Kaplan, R. Rattazzi. 2015
307 citations recorded by the source corpus.
We present a renormalizable theory of scalars in which the low-energy effective theory contains a pseudo-Goldstone boson with a compact field space of 2 pi F and an approximate discrete shift symmetry Z(Q) with Q >> 1, yet the number of fields in the theory goes as log Q. Such a model can serve as a UV completion to models of relaxions and is a new source of exponential scale separation in field theory. While the model is local in "theory space," it appears not to have a continuum generalization (i.e., it cannot be a deconstructed extra dimension). Our framework shows that super-Planckian field excursions can be mimicked while sticking to renormalizable four-dimensional quantum field theory. We show that a supersymmetric extension is straightforwardly obtained, and we illustrate possible UV completions based on a compact extra dimension, where all global symmetries arise accidentally as a consequence of gauge invariance and five-dimensional locality.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/41aa50a7985eaf73420af822fa5d840746d03da0
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Citations in the corpus
- Evidence for a sublattice weak gravity conjecture (2016, unknown): “This distinction could be very important: for example, the extra-dimensional version of the “clockwork axion” model [59] involves a sequence of N Higgs fields used to produce an effective gauge coupling that is exponentially suppressed (and, ultimately, field range that is exponentially large) in N ”
- Using the Full Power of the Cosmic Microwave Background to Probe Axion Dark Matter (2017, background): “A particularly interesting possibility is the “clockwork” mechanism, which can lower the symmetry breaking scale as far as 1 TeV while maintaining very large field excursions, (see e.g. Kaplan & Rattazzi 2016; Higaki et al. 2016).”
- Recent Progress in the Physics of Axions and Axion-Like Particles (2020, background): “As will be discussed in more detail, many of these developments involve axions with hierarchical couplings, so motivate the model building efforts to generate the necessary coupling hierarchies in low energy effective theory [26–29].”
- Opportunities in Flavour Physics at the HL-LHC and HE-LHC (2018, methodology): “The clockwork mechanism, introduced in [1419, 1420] and later generalized to a broader context in Ref.”
- Dark photon dark matter produced by axion oscillations (2018, unknown): “[43] D.”
- The landscape of QCD axion models (2020, unknown): “‘clockwork’ type of constructions [537–540].”
- The photo-philic QCD axion (2016, methodology): “In this section we review the clockwork mechanism [9] and show how it can be used to generate a QCD axion with an exponentially large coupling cγ.”
- From the Trees to the Forest: A Review of Radiative Neutrino Mass Models (2017, background): “One can also have a “clockwork” mechanism [70, 71] to generate exponentially suppressed Dirac masses.”
- TASI Lectures on the Strong CP Problem and Axions (2018, background): “Although these approaches have been around for a long time [64, 65], a move of marketing genius has recently renamed them as clockwork models [66, 67].”