Can anyone explain how axions may exist and operate in an physically intuitive manner?

[repoman]

I have been looking at the wiki articles and other sources, mostly university popularizing web pages, and I am at a near total loss to understand what is going on.

Do even the people who are proficient with the math have a physical intuition about what is happening?

Anyone want to take a crack at this?

 

[skepticalbip]

To save you a lot of frustrating research time, there is nothing intuitive about quantum mechanics. Even further, Richard Feinman gave an even stronger statement that anyone who claims to understand quantum mechanics doesn't understand quantum mechanics.

 

[repoman]

Yeah, but there is some level of understanding the quantum physics as similar to classical physics with the typical quantum curveballs thrown in.

But it seems like axions even if there was some type of classical approximation are a very different beast than the standard model particles.

 

[barbos]

You seem to be trying to skip quite a few topics to get to axion.
I don't find wiki all that difficult to have overall understanding
Basically QCD has free parameters and one of them turned out to be either zero or very small. Both cases are weird
So they are trying to explain that fact and one of the explanation involves introducing axions.

 

[repoman]

Yeah, I got a lot of that already. I read the wiki article twice and a lot of other articles as well.

This one as well:
https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-axions-may-explain-times-arrow-20160107/

Several explanations have been put forward, but only one has stood the test of time. The central idea is due to Roberto Peccei and Helen Quinn. Their proposal, like that of Kobayashi and Maskawa, involves expanding the standard model in a fairly specific way. One introduces a neutralizing field, whose behavior is especially sensitive to ’t Hooft’s new interaction. Indeed if that new interaction is present, then the neutralizing field will adjust its own value, so as to cancel that interaction’s influence. (This adjustment process is broadly similar to how negatively charged electrons in a solid will congregate around a positively charged impurity and thereby screen its influence.) The neutralizing field thereby closes our loophole.

In the same way that there were a lot of Higgs field/ Higgs Boson videos/charts a few years ago that had an attempt to have the topic relate to our Newtonian senses, if the Axion was very convincingly experimentally detected what would those videos/charts look like?

But it would need to include the misalignment mechanism, right?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misalignment_mechanism

 

[steve_bank]

I have been looking at the wiki articles and other sources, mostly university popularizing web pages, and I am at a near total loss to understand what is going on.

Do even the people who are proficient with the math have a physical intuition about what is happening?

Anyone want to take a crack at this?

For me intuition is the result of knowledge and experience. How our brains work in detail is TBD. Debating 'physical intuition' leads to an endless debate in metaphysics.