Abstract
We argue that demanding a consistent cosmological history, including the absence of domain walls and strongly interacting relics at the Peccei-Quinn scale, singles out two concrete realizations of hadronic QCD axions as viable dark matter models. These realizations generally feature flavor-violating axion couplings to Standard Model quarks that are unsuppressed at low energies. As a consequence, experiments looking for flavor-violating hadronic processes involving the axion can be sensitive probes of QCD axion dark matter models. In particular, we show that the NA62 and KOTO experiments could detect the K → π + a decay for axions consistent with the observed dark matter abundance via the post-inflationary misalignment mechanism.
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Acknowledgments
We thank Jacky Kumar and David London for helpful correspondence. This work was supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) of Canada.
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Alonso-Álvarez, G., Cline, J.M. & Xiao, T. The flavor of QCD axion dark matter. J. High Energ. Phys. 2023, 187 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP07(2023)187
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP07(2023)187