Study of the interactions of the axion with mesons and photons using a chiral effective Lagrangian model

Abstract

We investigate the most interesting decay processes involving axions, photons and the lightest pseudoscalar mesons, making use of a chiral effective Lagrangian model with $L=3$ light quark flavors, which also includes the flavor-singlet pseudoscalar meson and implements the $U(1)$ axial anomaly of the fundamental theory. In particular, we compute the electromagnetic coupling of the axion to photons and we compare our result with the prediction of the Chiral Effective Lagrangian with $L=2$ light quark flavors. Moreover, we study the decay channels $\eta /{\eta }^{\prime }\to \pi \pi a$ and we estimate the corresponding decay widths, using the existing bounds on the $U(1{)}_{PQ}$ breaking scale.

Comments: 22 pages, 1 table; completely revised version, published in Eur. Phys. J. C