Flavor probes of axion-like particles

Understand

Axions and axion-like particles (ALPs) are well-motivated low-energy relics of high-energy extensions of the Standard Model (SM).

• We investigate the phenomenology of an ALP with flavor-changing couplings, and present a comprehensive analysis of quark and lepton flavor-changing observables within a general ALP effective field theory.
• Observables studied include rare meson decays, flavor oscillations of neutral mesons, rare lepton decays, and dipole moments.
• We derive bounds on the general ALP couplings as a function of its mass, consistently taking into account the ALP lifetime and branching ratios.