The minimal UV-induced effective QCD axion theory.

The characteristic axion couplings could be generated via effective couplings between the Standard Model (SM) fermions to a pseudo-Goldstone from a high-scale U(1) Peccei–Quinn (PQ) symmetry breaking. Assuming that the UV-induced effective operators generate necessary couplings before the PQ symmetry breaking, and any low-scale couplings to the SM are restricted to the Yukawa sector, three minimal natural scenarios can be formulated, which provide a connection between the QCD axions and mediators at the GUT/string scales. We find that the PQ symmetry breaking scale could be about 1 0 1 5  GeV, higher than the classical QCD dark matter axion window but possible if the anthropic window is considered. We also propose an experiment to probe such scenarios. If the dark matter axion is discovered, they might suggest that we live in an atypical Hubble volume. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]