2024/11/22 by Csaba Csáki, Rotem Ovadia, Csáki, Csaba +7
Physics and Astronomy · #FOS: Physical sciences #High Energy Physics - Phenomenology (hep-ph) #High Energy Physics - Theory (hep-th) #Quantum Mechanics and Applications
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2411.15312
openalex publication_date 2024/11/22 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
We present a fully calculable UV complete toy model of a Peccei-Quinn (PQ) axion coupled to magnetic monopoles as well as electric charges. The theory has manifest electric-magnetic duality built in. We find that the axion-photon coupling contains the usual anomaly term, plus periodic corrections which can also become large if the monopole is light, without violating the discrete axion shift symmetry. These additional periodic terms can be identified as the non-perturbative corrections due to the monopoles (and other BPS states), but can also be interpreted as a sum over instanton corrections. The key aspect helping reconcile axion coupling quantization with electric-magnetic duality is the fact that the axion itself undergoes a non-linear transformation under electric-magnetic duality. The theory analyzed here is just the original N=2 supersymmetric SU(2) Seiberg-Witten theory, which contains a PQ axion due to an anomalous spontaneously broken global R-symmetry, as well as massless fermionic monopoles and dyons at special points in the moduli space. Hence the entire machinery of the Seiberg-Witten solution can be applied to reliably calculate the photon-axion coupling in different duality frames. We show explicitly that the physically observable axion-photon amplitude is duality invariant, as it had to be.