Letter
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Heavy QCD axion at Belle II: Displaced and prompt signals

Emilie Bertholet ¹, Sabyasachi Chakraborty ^2,3, Vazha Loladze ², Takemichi Okui ^2,4, Abner Soffer ¹, and Kohsaku Tobioka^2,4

¹School of Physics and Astronomy, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv 69978, Israel
²Department of Physics, Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida 32306, USA
³SISSA International School for Advanced Studies, Via Bonomea 265, Trieste 34136, Italy
⁴Theory Center, High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK), Tsukuba 305-0801, Japan

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Phys. Rev. D 105, L071701 – Published 13 April, 2022

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.105.L071701

Abstract

The QCD axion is a well-motivated addition to the standard model to solve the strong $C P$ problem. If the axion acquires mass dominantly from a hidden sector, it can be as heavy as $O (1) GeV$ , and the decay constant can be as low as $O (100) GeV$ without running into the axion quality problem. We propose new search strategies for such heavy QCD axions at the Belle II experiment, where the axions are expected to be produced via $B \to K a$ . We find that a subsequent decay $a \to 3 π$ with a displaced vertex leads to a unique signal with essentially no background, and that a dedicated search can explore the range $O (1 - 10) TeV$ of decay-constant values. We also show that $a \to γ γ$ can cover a significant portion of currently unexplored region of $150 ≲ m_{a} ≲ 500 MeV$ .

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Phys. Rev. D 105, L071701– Published 13 April, 2022

Vol. 105, Iss. 7 — 1 April 2022

Received 1 September 2021
Accepted 25 March 2022

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.105.L071701

Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by SCOAP³.

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Heavy QCD axion at Belle II: Displaced and prompt signals

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