Ömer Berkant YILDIZ University of Warsaw

Axion

Intoduction

In these short essays’ series, I will introduce you to the several topics in Cosmology. First paper
will be about Axions. Also these papers will take place as an assessment regarding to Seminar
“Theory of elementary particles and cosmology” course. Axions are hypothetical particles
postulated by high-energy physics to overcome the problem of strong charge-parity. Although
axions have been identified in quantum field theory for a long time, they have yet to be detected
in nature as elementary particles. However, axions can form as quasiparticles in condensed-
matter systems in certain materials, such as strong topological insulators. Exciting physical
phenomena in condensed-matter systems, such as a fractional quantum anomalous Hall effect,
the chiral anomaly, exotic Casimir-Lifshitz repulsion, and a linear magnetoelectric response
quantized in units of the fine-structure constant, are expected to result from the corresponding
axion field. The first signatures of electronic states that allow axion dynamics have been
discovered in condensed-matter systems.

There's a concept known as CP symmetry, which states that if you exchange a particle for its
antiparticle and then reflect the universe in a mirror, everything remains the same that is,
reflection "undoes" the particle-antiparticle switch. The weak force (violates CP symmetry. For
complicated reasons, it appears that the weak force's violation of CP symmetry should imply a
lot of CP symmetry violation in the strong force, but no one has been able to measure it.

This implies that a certain variable in Quantum Chromodynamics must be very close to zero.
It's possible that this is just a coincidence but if, rather than being a fixed parameter for the
universe, that variable represents a quantum field (like the electromagnetic field), with a value
for every point in space, then it explains why it's always zero in experiments. Every quantum
field, on the other hand, has an associated particle. Because finding the particle proves that the
field exists, people began looking for this extra type of particle to explain why the strong force
does not exhibit CP violation. The axion is a theoretical particle. The axion would have very
little mass, no electric charge, and no color charge, so it would interact with normal matter very
little.