https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-023-11378-1
Regular Article - Theoretical Physics
Axions, WIMPs, proton decay and observable r in SO(10)
1
Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Alabama, 35487, Tuscaloosa, AL, USA
2
Physics Department, Washington College, 21620, Chestertown, MD, USA
3
Bartol Research Institute, Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Delaware, 19716, Newark, DE, USA
Received:
5
August
2022
Accepted:
3
March
2023
Published online:
3
April
2023
We explore some experimentally testable predictions of an SO(10) axion model which includes two 10-plets of fermions in order to resolve the axion domain wall problem. The axion symmetry can be safely broken after inflation, so that the isocurvature perturbations associated with the axion field are negligibly small. An unbroken gauge symmetry in SO(10) ensures the presence of a stable WIMP-like dark matter, a linear combination of the electroweak doublets in the fermion 10-plets and an SO(10) singlet fermion with mass
when it is mostly the singlet (doublet) fermion, that co-exists with axion dark matter. We also discuss gauge coupling unification, proton decay, inflation with non-minimal coupling to gravity and leptogenesis. With the identification of the SM singlet Higgs field in the 126 representation of SO(10) as inflaton, the magnetic monopoles are inflated away, and we find
and
, where
and r denote the scalar spectral index and tensor-to-scalar ratio, respectively. These predictions can be tested in future experiments such as CMB-S4.
© The Author(s) 2023
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