Color unified dynamical axion

We consider an enlarged color sector which solves the strong CP problem via new massless fermions. The spontaneous breaking of a unified color group into QCD and another confining group provides a source of naturally large axion mass $$m_a$$ due to small size instantons. This extra source of axion mass respects automatically the alignment of the vacuum, ensuring a low-energy CP-conserving vacuum. The mechanism does not appeal to a $$Z_2$$ “mirror” copy of the SM, nor does it require any fine-tuning of the axion-related couplings at the unification scale. There is no very light axion and uncharacteristically the lighter spectrum contains instead sterile fermions. The axion scale $$f_a$$ can be naturally brought down to a few TeV, with an exotic spectrum of colored pseudoscalars lighter than this scale, observable at colliders exclusively via strong interactions. The $$\{m_a, f_a\}$$ parameter space which allows a solution of the strong CP problem is thus enlarged well beyond that of invisible axion models.