Axion Detection Experiments Can Probe Majoron Models

Abstract

The majoron is a well-motivated light (pseudo-Nambu-Goldstone) boson associated with the spontaneous breaking of a global lepton-number symmetry. In this Letter, we relate the spontaneous breaking scale to its soft-breaking mass by requiring that the majoron is the main component of the dark matter. An electromagnetic-anomalous coupling can be induced by minimally modifying the original majoron model, surprisingly, predicting a parameter region that largely overlaps with the QCD-axion dark matter band. Thus, we expect that axion search experiments to be able to probe majoron models. Published by the American Physical Society 2025