arXiv subjects

Ling-Xiao Xu

Publications and source records attributed to Ling-Xiao Xu.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Phenomenological implications of a class of non-invertible selection rules

We demonstrate that non-invertible fusion algebras give rise to a class of selection rules with genuine organizing power in particle physics models, which we call non-invertible selection rules (NISRs). We identify the algebraic structures that distinguish NISRs from ordinary group-based selection rules and from their generic explicit breaking. As a minimal example, we study a singlet-scalar extension of the Standard Model and show that the NISR based on Fibonacci fusion rules leads to distinctive scattering patterns. We further apply the Ising fusion rules to a supersymmetric flipped $SU(5)$ model, addressing the doublet-triplet splitting problem. In this construction, the NISR plays a crucial role in forbidding the $μ$-term, thereby evading a no-go result for ordinary Abelian symmetries. We anticipate that this class of selection rules can be applied to a wide range of models beyond the Standard Model. To facilitate such applications, we provide a pedagogical review of radiative violation of NISRs in the appendices, with a dark matter model also being discussed.

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arXiv2026

Spurion Analysis for Non-Invertible Selection Rules from Near-Group Fusions

We generalize the framework of spurion analysis to a class of selection rules arising from non-invertible fusion algebras in perturbation theory. As a first step toward systematic applications to particle physics, we analyze the near-group fusion algebras, defined by fusion rules built from a finite Abelian group $G$ extended by a single non-invertible element. Notable examples include the Fibonacci and Ising fusion rules. We introduce a systematic scheme for labeling coupling constants at the level of the non-invertible fusion algebra, enabling consistent tracking of couplings when constructing composite amplitudes from simpler building blocks. Our labeling provides a clear interpretation of why the tree-level exact non-invertible selection rules are violated through radiative corrections, a unique phenomenon essential to ``loop-induced groupification''. We also identify the limit where the near-group fusion algebra is lifted to a $G\times \mathbb{Z}_2$ group, which provides an alternative scheme of spurion analysis consistent with the original one based on the near-group algebra. Meanwhile, we highlight the distinctions between the selection rules imposed by the near-group fusion algebra and those from breaking the $G\times \mathbb{Z}_2$ group.

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arXiv2026

A General Prescription for Spurion Analysis of Non-Invertible Selection Rules

We formulate a general prescription for spurion analysis in particle-physics models whose selection rules are described by commutative non-invertible fusion algebras. The construction applies to fusion algebras containing non-invertible basis elements that need not be self-conjugate, thereby allowing us to systematically track coupling constants in arbitrary particle scattering processes at tree and loop orders, but without assuming faithful realization of the fusion algebra, or no other quantum numbers for dynamical particles. This unifies and streamlines the previous analysis of near-group fusion algebras and of the $\mathbb{Z}_M/\mathbb{Z}_2$ fusion algebras, and supports the broader viewpoint that the non-invertible selection rules often admit auxiliary descriptions using lifted Abelian groups with a structured set of explicit breaking terms.

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arXiv2026

Partial-Wave Unitarity Bounds on Higher-Dimensional Operators from 2-to-$N$ Scattering

We present a systematic method for deriving partial-wave unitarity bounds on Wilson coefficients of higher-dimensional operators in effective field theories involving more than four fields, which naturally appear in tree-level 2-to-$N$ scattering processes with $N \geq 3$. Unlike 2-to-2 scattering, 2-to-$N$ scattering with $N \geq 3$ features multiple amplitudes associated with the same total angular momentum. To resolve these degeneracies, we provide a way to construct an orthonormal amplitude basis by parameterizing the phase space manifold of massless particles using spinor-helicity variables, enabling analytical integration over the phase space with arbitrary particle numbers. We provide Mathematica code to analytically evaluate phase space integrals of interference between two local on-shell amplitudes up to four final-state particles, with straightforward generalization to $N$ final-state particles. As practical applications, we demonstrate the use of this tool by deriving unitarity bounds on some dimension-7 and dimension-8 operators in the Standard Model effective field theory involving five and six fields, respectively.

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arXiv2025

Dynamical symmetry breaking in Georgi-Glashow chiral-gauge theories

We investigate dynamical symmetry breaking in a class of chiral gauge theories containing the Georgi-Glashow model. These theories feature a gauge sector and two fermion species that transform in the two-index antisymmetric and antifundamental representations with different multiplicities. Using the effective action formalism and the functional renormalization group, we derive the flow of four-fermion interactions that encode their resonant structure and information about bound-state formation. Generalizing the theories to multiple generations, we make contact with the loss of asymptotic freedom and dissect the boundary of a conjectured conformal window. Our results show that, while most of the theory space displays a dominant color-breaking condensate, there exists a strongly coupled regime where the lowest-laying mechanisms fail and more intricate dynamics are expected to arise. This analysis provides a first step toward the infrared behavior of chiral gauge theories with functional methods.

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arXiv2025

Spurion Analysis of $\mathbb{Z}_M/\mathbb{Z}_2$ Non-Invertible Selection Rules: Low-Order versus All-Order Zeros

Motivated by recent progress in the spurion analysis of non-invertible selection rules (NISRs) arising from near-group fusion algebras, we further generalize the framework to a class of NISRs obtained from $\mathbb{Z}_2$ orbifolding of a $\mathbb{Z}_M$ symmetry, denoted as $\mathbb{Z}_M/\mathbb{Z}_2$. Many structural features are carried over: for instance, our labeling scheme enables systematic tracking of all couplings when constructing composite amplitudes from simpler building blocks at arbitrary loop orders in perturbation theory. Our analysis provides a transparent understanding of both low-order and all-order zeros of couplings under radiative corrections. Furthermore, we examine the fate of low-order zeros when the fusion algebra is not faithfully realized -- a situation not captured by the vanilla argument of ``loop-induced groupification'' -- and formulate a conjecture on the related aspects of particle decoupling and effective theory. Finally, we discuss the low-order versus all-order zeros in Yukawa textures from the perspective of spurion analysis.

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arXiv2025

To Break or Not to Break: A Review of a No-Go Theorem on Chiral Symmetry Breaking in QCD-like Theories

This is a pedagogical review of some recent progress in rigorously proving chiral symmetry breaking in a class of QCD-like theories that closely resemble the real-world QCD, namely the $SU(N_c)$ Yang-Mills theory coupled to $N_f$ flavors of massless quarks in the fundamental representation. Based on 't Hooft anomaly matching and persistent mass conditions, a general no-go theorem is formulated: assuming that the theory flows in the infrared to a fully color-screened, infrared-free phase described by color-singlet hadrons, symmetry and anomaly constraints necessarily imply spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking; conversely, any phase with unbroken chiral symmetry must retain unscreened color charges, thereby ruling out a fully color-singlet hadron description in the infrared. While these results have been widely assumed, the recent developments reviewed here establish them with a new level of rigor. The persistent mass condition, carefully formulated here, plays a central role, just as it does in the Vafa-Witten theorem on unbroken vectorlike symmetries.

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arXiv2025

Staggered Fermions with Chiral Anomaly Cancellation

We investigate the implications of the quantized vectorial and axial charges in the lattice Hamiltonian of multi-flavor staggered fermions in $(1+1)$ dimensions. These lattice charges coincide with those of the $U(1)_V$ and $U(1)_A$ global symmetries of Dirac fermions in the continuum limit, whose perturbative chiral anomaly matches the non-Abelian Onsager algebra on the lattice. In this note, we focus on the lattice models that flow to continuum quantum field theories of Dirac fermions that are free from the perturbative chiral anomaly between $U(1)_V$ and $U(1)_A$. In a lattice model that flows to two Dirac fermions, we identify quadratic Hamiltonian deformations that can gap the system while fully preserving both the vectorial and axial charges on the lattice. These deformations flow to the usual symmetry-preserving Dirac mass terms in the continuum. Additionally, we propose a lattice model that flows to the chiral fermion $3-4-5-0$ model in the continuum by using these lattice charges, and we discuss the multi-fermion interactions that can generate a mass gap in the paradigm of symmetric mass generation.

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arXiv2025

A novel strategy to prove chiral symmetry breaking in QCD-like theories

We demonstrate that chiral symmetry breaking occurs in the confining regime of QCD-like theories with $N_c$ colors and $N_f$ flavors. Our proof is based on a novel strategy, called `downlifting', by which solutions of the 't Hooft anomaly matching and persistent mass conditions for a theory with $N_f-1$ flavors are constructed from those of a theory with $N_f$ flavors, while $N_c$ is fixed. By induction, chiral symmetry breaking is proven for any $N_f\geq p_{min}$ in the confining regime, where $p_{min}$ is the smallest prime factor of $N_c$. The proof can be extended to $N_f <p_{min}$ under the additional assumption on the absence of phase transitions when quark masses are sent to infinity. Our results do not rely on assumptions on the spectrum of massless bound states other than the fact that they are color-singlet hadrons.

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arXiv2024

On the Proof of Chiral Symmetry Breaking from Anomaly Matching in QCD-like Theories

We critically reconsider the argument based on 't Hooft anomaly matching that aims at proving chiral symmetry breaking in confining four-dimensional QCD-like theories with $N_c>2$ colors and $N_f$ flavors. The main line of reasoning relies on a property of the solutions of the anomaly matching and persistent mass equations called $N_f$-independence. In previous works, the validity of $N_f$-independence was assumed based on qualitative arguments, but it was never proven rigorously. We provide a detailed proof and clarify under which (dynamical) conditions it holds. Our results are valid for a generic spectrum of massless composite fermions including baryons and exotics.

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arXiv2024

Understanding the SM gauge group from SMEFT

We discuss heavy particles that can be used to pin down the faithful Standard Model (SM) gauge group and their patterns in the SM effective field theory (SMEFT). These heavy particles are not invariant under a specific $\mathbb{Z}_6$ subgroup of $SU(3)_c\times SU(2)_L \times U(1)_Y$, which however acts trivially on all the SM particles, hence the faithful SM gauge group remains undetermined. Different realizations of the faithful SM gauge group correspond to different spectra of heavy particles, and they also correspond to distinct sets of line operators with one-form global symmetry acting on them. We show that the heavy particles not invariant under the $\mathbb{Z}_6$ group cannot appear in tree-level ultraviolet completions of SMEFT, this enforces us to consider one-loop UV completions of SMEFT to identify the $\mathbb{Z}_6$ non-invariant heavy particles. We demonstrate with examples that correlations between Wilson coefficients provide an efficient way to examine models with $\mathbb{Z}_6$ non-invariant heavy particles. Finally, we prove that all the scalars that can trigger electroweak symmetry breaking must be invariant under the $\mathbb{Z}_6$ group, hence they cannot be used to probe the faithful SM gauge group.

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arXiv2024

On the Proof of Chiral Symmetry Breaking through Anomaly Matching in QCD-like Theories: An Exemplification

Our recent works revisit the proof of chiral symmetry breaking in the confining phase of four-dimensional QCD-like theories, i.e. $SU(N_c)$ gauge theories with $N_f$ flavors of vectorlike quarks in the fundamental representation. The analysis relies on the structure of 't Hooft anomaly matching and persistent mass conditions for theories with same $N_c$ and different $N_f$. In this paper, we work out concrete examples with $N_c=3$ and $N_c=5$ to support and elucidate the results in the companion papers. Within the same examples, we also test some claims made in earlier works.

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arXiv2023

Axion Free-kick Misalignment Mechanism

We propose an alternative scenario for the axion misalignment mechanism based on the nontrivial interplay between the axion and a light dilaton in the early universe. Dark matter abundance is still sourced by the initial misalignment of the axion field, whose motion along the potential kicks the dilaton field away from its minimum, and dilaton starts to oscillate later with a delayed onset time for oscillation and a relatively large misalignment value due to the kick; eventually the dilaton dominates over the axion in their energy densities, and the dilaton is identified as dark matter. The kick effect due to axion motion is the most significant if the initial field value of dilaton is near its minimum; therefore, we call this scenario axion free-kick misalignment mechanism, where axion plays the role similar to a football player. Dark matter abundance can be obtained with a lower axion decay constant compared to the conventional misalignment mechanism.

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arXiv2022

Grand Color Axion

We present a model that solves the strong CP problem via an axion parametrically heavier than the standard one. Within this picture the Standard Model quarks are embedded into a larger non-abelian Grand Color group that at high scales splits into ordinary QCD and an additional confining dynamics under which exotic chiral fermions are charged. Crucially, the vacuum expectation value of the axion is automatically relaxed to zero because the only renormalizable source of explicit CP violation, beyond those encoded in the topological angles, is contained in the Standard Model Yukawa couplings, and is therefore very suppressed. The axion potential is controlled by the scale of the new confining group and is much larger than the QCD contribution, such that its dynamics is less exposed to the so-called "axion quality problem". Potentially observable corrections to the effective topological angle can also arise, in our model as well as in a large class of heavy axion scenarios, from non-renormalizable Peccei-Quinn-conserving interactions, which introduce a new "heavy axion quality problem". Our model has a very minimal field content, it relies entirely on gauge invariance and does not require the introduction of additional symmetries beyond the usual one postulated by Peccei and Quinn. The phenomenology is very rich and can be tested at colliders as well as via cosmological observations. A particularly interesting portion of parameter space predicts a visible axion of mass above the GeV and decay constant larger than a few TeV.

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arXiv2022

On the Derivation of Chiral Symmetry Breaking in QCD-like Theories and S-confining Theories

Recent works argue that the pattern of chiral symmetry breaking in QCD-like theories can be derived from supersymmetric (SUSY) QCD with perturbation of anomaly-mediated SUSY breaking (AMSB). Nevertheless, despite the fact that AMSB needs to be a small (but still exact) perturbation, there are two other major problems remaining unsolved: first, in order to derive the chiral symmetry breaking pattern, one needs to minimize the potential along a certain specific direction, identifying this direction fully as an outcome is nontrivial given the moduli space of degenerate vacua in the SUSY limit; second, when SUSY is broken, non-holomorphic states might emerge and be relevant for determining the vacuum structure. In this work, we focus on SUSY QCD with $N_f\leq N_c+1$ and perturb the theories using AMSB. Without minimizing the potential along a certain specific direction in the moduli space, we successfully derive the expected chiral symmetry breaking pattern when $N_f<N_c$. However, when $N_f=N_c$ and $N_f=N_c+1$, we show that tree-level AMSB would induce runaway directions, along which baryon number is spontaneously broken, and the vacua with broken baryon number can be deeper while the field values are not far from the origin. This implies that phase transitions and/or non-holomorphic physics are necessary. Moreover, we perform explicit consistency checks on ultraviolet insensitivity for different $N_f$ by adding the holomorphic mass term for the last flavor, we find that the jump of AMSB potential indeed matches the contribution from the holomorphic mass term. We also show in general that, when tree-level AMSB is not vanishing, the origin of the moduli space in s-confining theories does not persist as a minimum.

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arXiv2021

What can we learn from the total width of the Higgs boson?

As one of the key properties of the Higgs boson, the Higgs total width is sensitive to global profile of the Higgs boson couplings, and thus new physics would modify the Higgs width. We investigate the total width in various new physics models, including various scalar extension, composite Higgs models, and fraternal twin Higgs model. Typically the Higgs width is smaller than the standard model value due to mixture with other scalar if the Higgs is elementary, or curved Higgs field space for the composite Higgs. On the other hand, except the possible invisible decay mode, the enhanced Yukawa coupling in the two Higgs doublet model or the exotic fermion embeddings in the composite Higgs, could enhance the Higgs width greatly. The precision measurement of the Higgs total width at the high-luminosity LHC can be used to discriminate certain new physics models.

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arXiv2021

Softly shifting away from dark matter direct detection

We propose soft breaking mechanism for dark matter (DM) shift symmetry in a class of composite dark matter models, where both DM and the Higgs boson arise as pseudo Nambu-Goldstone bosons from novel strong dynamics. Our mechanism is utilized to suppress the non-derivative portal coupling between the Higgs boson and DM particle, which can evade the stringent bound of current DM direct detection experiments. Otherwise this non-derivative portal coupling would naturally be at the same order of the Higgs quartic, rendering this class of models under severe crisis. For realizing soft breaking mechanism, we introduce vector-like top partners, dubbed as "softons", to restore the shift symmetry of DM in top Yukawa sector, which however is only broken by the softon masses. The portal coupling would automatically vanish as the shift-symmetry-breaking softon masses approach zero. Specifically we present a proof-of-concept model of soft breaking, based on the coset $O(6)/O(5)$ and the simplest fermion embedding, and study its DM phenomenology, where we show a large amount of novel parameter space is opened up by using the soft breaking mechanism.

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arXiv2020

Determining the Shape of Higgs Potential at Future Colliders

Although the Higgs boson has been discovered, its self-couplings are poorly constrained. This leaves the nature of the Higgs boson undetermined. Motivated by different Higgs potential scenarios other than the Landau-Ginzburg type in the standard model, we systematically organize various new physics scenarios -- elementary Higgs, Nambu-Goldstone Higgs, Coleman-Weinberg Higgs, and Tadpole-induced Higgs, etc. We find that double-Higgs production at the 27 TeV high energy LHC can be used to discriminate different Higgs potential scenarios, while it is necessary to use triple-Higgs production at a future 100 TeV proton-proton collider to fully determine the shape of the Higgs potential.

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