Dark matter as ultralight axion-like particle in E6 × U(1)X GUT with QCD axion

Abstract

Axion-like fields are naturally generated by a mechanism of anomaly cancellation of one or more anomalous gauge abelian symmetries at the Planck scale, emerging as duals of a two-form from the massless bosonic sector of string theory. This suggests an analogy of the Green–Schwarz mechanism of anomaly cancellation, at field theory level, which results in one or more Stueckelberg pseudoscalars. In the case of a single Stueckelberg pseudoscalar b, vacuum misalignments at phase transitions in the early Universe at the GUT scale provide a small mass – due to instanton suppression of the periodic potential – for a component of b, denoted as χ and termed the “axi-Higgs”, which is a physical axion-like particle. The coupling of the axi-Higgs to the gauge sector via Wess–Zumino terms is suppressed by the Planck mass, which guarantees its decoupling, while its angle of misalignment is related to MGUT. We build a gauged E6×U(1) model with anomalous U(1). It contains both an automatic invisible QCD axion and an ultra-light axi-Higgs. The invisible axion present in the model solves the strong CP problem and has mass in the conventional range while the axi-Higgs, which can act as dark matter, is sufficiently light (10−22 eV<mχ<10−20 eV) to solve short-distance problems which confront other cold dark matter candidates.