Accidental SO(10) axion from gauged flavour

Understand

An accidental U(1) Peccei-Quinn (PQ) symmetry automatically arises in a class of SO(10) unified theories upon gauging the SU(3)$_{f}$ flavour group.

• The PQ symmetry is protected by the $\mathbb{Z}_4 \times \mathbb{Z}_3$ center of $\text{SO(10)} \times \text{SU(3)}_f$ up to effective operators of canonical dimension six.
• However, high-scale contributions to the axion potential posing a PQ quality problem arise only at $d=9$.
• In the pre-inflationary PQ breaking scenario the axion mass window is predicted to be $m_a \in [7 \times 10^{-8}, 10^{-3}]$ eV, where the lower end is bounded by the seesaw scale and the upper end by iso-curvature fluctuations.