Spontaneous Peccei-Quinn symmetry breaking renders sterile neutrino, axion and χboson to be candidates for dark matter particles

Abstract

We study the Peccei-Quinn (PQ) symmetry of the sterile right-handed neutrino sector and the gauge symmetries of the Standard Model. Due to four-fermion interactions, spontaneous breaking of these symmetries at the electroweak scale generates top-quark Dirac mass and sterile-neutrino Majorana mass. The top quark channel yields massive Higgs, W± and Z0 bosons. The sterile neutrino channel yields the heaviest sterile neutrino Majorana mass, sterile Nambu-Goldstone axion (or majoron) and massive scalar χboson. Four-fermion operators effectively induce their tiny couplings to SM particles. We show that a sterile QCD axion is the PQ solution to the strong CP problem. The lightest and heaviest sterile neutrinos (mNe∼102 keV and mNτ∼102 GeV), a sterile QCD axion (ma<10−8 eV, gaγ<10−13GeV−1) and a Higgs-like χboson (mχ∼102 GeV) can be dark matter particle candidates, for the constraints of their tiny couplings and long lifetimes inferred from the W-boson decay width, Xenon1T and precision fine-structure-constant experiments. The axion and χboson couplings to SM particles are below the values reached by current laboratory experiments and astrophysical observations for directly or indirectly detecting dark matter particles.