Diphoton signatures from heavy axion decays at the CERN Large Hadron Collider

Abstract

Recently, the LHC collaborations, ATLAS and CMS, have announced an excess in the diphoton channel with local significance of about $3\,\sigma$ around an invariant mass distribution of $\sim 750$ GeV, after analyzing new data collected at centre-of-mass energies of $\sqrt{s} = 13~{\rm TeV}$. We present a possible physical interpretation of such a signature, within the framework of a minimal UV-complete model with a massive singlet pseudo-scalar state $a$ that couples to a new TeV-scale coloured vector-like fermion $F$, whose hypercharge quantum number is a non-zero integer. The pseudo-scalar state $a$ might be a heavy pseudo-Goldstone boson, such as a heavy axion, which decays into two photons and whose mass lies around the excess region. The mass of the CP-odd state $a$ and its coupling to $F$ may be due to non-perturbative effects, which can break the original Goldstone shift symmetry dynamically. The possible role that the heavy axion $a$ can play in the radiative generation of a seesaw Majorana scale and in the solution to the so-called strong CP problem is briefly discussed.