Flavoured warped axion
Quentin Bonnefoy (Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron DESY, Hamburg, 22607, Germany); Peter Cox (School of Physics, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria, 3010, Australia); Emilian Dudas (CPHT Ecole Polytechnique, CNRS, Institute Polytechnique de Paris, Palaiseau, 91128, France); Tony Gherghetta (School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 55455, USA); Minh Nguyen (School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 55455, USA)
We consider a 5D extension of the DFSZ axion model that addresses both the axion quality and fermion mass hierarchy problems, and predicts flavour-dependent, off-diagonal axion-fermion couplings. The axion is part of a 5D complex scalar field charged under a U(1)PQ symmetry that is spontaneously broken in the bulk, and is insensitive to explicit PQ breaking on the UV boundary. Bulk Standard Model fermions interact with two Higgs doublets that can be localized on the UV boundary or propagate in the bulk to explain the fermion masses and mixings. When the Higgs doublets are localized on the UV boundary, they induce flavour diagonal couplings between the fermions and the axion. However, when the Higgs doublets propagate in the bulk, the overlap of the axion and fermion profiles generates flavour off-diagonal couplings. The effective scale of these off-diagonal couplings in both the quark and lepton sectors can be as small as 1011 GeV, and therefore will be probed in future precision flavour experiments.
