EFI Colloquium - Axions in QFT and Quantum Gravity, Matthew Reece, Harvard

3:30 pm MCP 201

933 East 56th Street
Chicago IL 60637

The QCD axion is well-studied as a solution to the Strong CP problem and a dark matter candidate. At the same time, one often hears that axions are ubiquitous in top-down string theory models of particle physics. I will discuss how both bottom-up and top-down considerations favor axion models where the axion is a mode of a higher-dimensional gauge field. I will provide a viewpoint on why the existence of axions could follow from general principles of quantum gravity, and what we might expect the QCD axion's properties to be.

Event Type

Colloquia

Oct 6