11–13 May 2026
University of Pittsburgh
US/Eastern timezone

Using symmetry breaking to obtain multiple copies of SU(M) related by a discrete, cyclic gauge symmetry

12 May 2026, 15:45
15m
David Lawrence Hall 107, University of Pittsburgh

David Lawrence Hall 107, University of Pittsburgh

Speaker

Noah McNeal (Harvard University)

Description

Without fine-tuning, it is difficult to maintain the utility of the axion as candidate solution to the strong CP problem when it is embedded in UV models due to additional interactions that spoil the IR phenomenology. Anson Hook has presented a model where the axion potential is naturally exponentially suppressed through its interactions with N copies of the same fermionic sector. Although each individual copy contributes a potentially quality-spoiling effective potential, the summation over all N sectors produces cancellations among them which eliminates the lowest-order dependence on the axion and flattens its total potential. The model hinges on a discrete ZN symmetry shifting one copy of the fermions to another cyclically. Here we examine how to embed this system in a UV completion. With a suitable choice of representation, we break SU(NM) into N tensored copies of SU(M) twisted by a semi-direct product with ZN which acts by the desired cyclic permutation.

Author

Noah McNeal (Harvard University)

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