Dark Matter Halo Axions Shift Hadron Collider $W$ Mass

Abstract

The 2026 measurement of the $W$ mass by CMS at the Large Hadron Collider disagrees sharply with the earlier and more precise measurement by CDF at the Tevatron, yet the CMS result seems to agree rather well with the standard model value. A similar fact pattern is identified for two other observables that have been the subject of recent intense interest: the strong coupling constant and the leading-order hadronic contribution to the muon magnetic dipole moment. Using a straightforward proper-time analysis of the leading-order hard gluon corrections to the $W$ boson production amplitude from quark-antiquark annihilation in high-energy hadron collisions, it is suggested that the CDF experiment has discovered a new phenomenon beyond the standard model and that the CMS measurement confirms this discovery: A coherent dynamic background axion field created by axions from the local dark matter halo of the galaxy couples to the hard virtual gluon within the luminous four-volume at the interaction point inside the collider detector and this axion-gluon coupling shifts the $W$ mass determination linearly in the product of the beam width and the bunch length.

Comments: 12 pages, no figures. Now with pedantic footnotes in response to pedantic referee report from JHEP