We point out that the long-standing strong CP problem may be resolved by an anthropic argument. The key ideas are: (i) to allow explicit breaking(s) of the Peccei-Quinn symmetry which reduces the strong CP problem to the cosmological constant problem, and (ii) to conjecture that the probability distribution of the vacuum energy has a mild pressure towards higher values. The cosmological problems of the (s)axion with a large Peccei-Quinn scale are absent in our mechanism, since the axion acquires a large mass from the explicit breaking.
The peculiar value of $θ$ is a challenge to the notion of an anthropic landscape. We briefly review the possibility that a suitable axion might arise from an anthropic requirement of dark matter. We then consider an alternative suggestion of Kaloper and Terning that $θ$ might be correlated with the cosmological constant. We note that in a landscape one expects that $θ$ is determined by the expectation value of one or more axions. We discuss how a discretuum of values of $θ$ might arise with an energy distribution dominated by QCD, and find the requirements to be quite stringent. Given such a d…
The relaxion mechanism provides a potentially elegant solution to the hierarchy problem without resorting to anthropic or other fine-tuning arguments. This mechanism introduces an axion-like field, dubbed the relaxion, whose expectation value determines the electroweak hierarchy as well as the QCD strong CP violating $\barθ$ parameter. During an inflationary period, the Higgs mass squared is selected to be negative and hierarchically small in a theory which is consistent with 't Hooft's technical naturalness criteria. However, in the original model proposed by Graham, Kaplan and Rajendran (201…
A scan of soft SUSY breaking parameters within the string theory landscape with the MSSM assumed as the low energy effective field theory -- using a power-law draw to large soft terms coupled with an anthropic selection of a derived weak scale to be within a factor four of our measured value -- predicts a peak probability of m_h~125 GeV with sparticles masses typically beyond the reach of LHC Run 2. Such multiverse simulations usually assume a fixed value of the SUSY conserving superpotential mu parameter to be within the assumed anthropic range, mu<~ 350 GeV. However, depending on the assumed…
One often hears that the strong $CP$ problem is the one problem which cannot be solved by anthropic reasoning. We argue that this is not so. Due to nonperturbative dynamics, states with a different $CP$ violating paramenter $θ$ acquire different vacuum energies after the QCD phase transition. These add to the total variation of the cosmological constant in the putative landscape of Universes. An interesting possibility arises when the cosmological constant is mostly cancelled by the membrane nucleation mechanism. If the step size in the resulting discretuum of cosmological constants, $ΔΛ$, is …
Setting aside anthropic arguments, there is no reason for CP symmetry to be obeyed within the theory of quantum chromodynamics. However, no such violation of CP symmetry has ever been observed in a strongly interacting experiment. This is known as the strong CP problem which, in its simplest manifestations, can be quantitatively formulated via a calculation of the pion masses and the neutron electric dipole moment. The former yields a larger mass for the neutral pion than its charged counterparts, the latter yields a far larger result than is experimentally measured, where in both cases the di…
The characteristic axion couplings could be generated via effective couplings between the Standard Model (SM) fermions to a pseudo-Goldstone from a high-scale $U(1)$ Peccei-Quinn (PQ) symmetry breaking. Assuming that the UV-induced effective operators generate necessary couplings before the PQ symmetry breaking, and any low-scale couplings to the SM are restricted to the Yukawa sector, three minimal natural scenarios can be formulated, which provides a connection between the QCD-axions and mediators at the GUT/string scales. We find that the PQ symmetry breaking scale could be about $10^{15}$ …
Rather general considerations of the string theory landscape imply a mild statistical draw towards large soft SUSY breaking terms tempered by the requirement of proper electroweak symmetry breaking where SUSY contributions to the weak scale are not too far from m(weak)~ 100 GeV. Such a picture leads to the prediction that m_h~ 125 GeV while most sparticles are beyond current LHC reach. Here we explore the possibility that the magnitude of the Peccei-Quinn (PQ) scale f_a is also set by string landscape considerations within the framework of a compelling SUSY axion model. First, we examine the c…
We argue that instantons play a crucial role in triggering the spontaneous breaking of chiral symmetry in the physics of the three light quarks in quantum chromodynamics. However, instantons may also play an essential role in our understanding of the suppression of CP violation in the strong interactions. We revive the possibility that the bare mass of the up quark is identically zero and the apparent small up quark mass is generated by the effective quark dynamics associated with instantons. In this case, the strong CP phase becomes unobservable and there is no strong CP violation.
