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Baryogenesis from Strong CP Violation and the QCD Axion

The strong CP-violating parameter is small today as indicated by constraints on the neutron electric dipole moment. In the early universe, the QCD axion has not yet relaxed to its QCD-cancelling minimum and it is natural to wonder whether this large CP violation could be responsible for baryogenesis. We show that strong CP violation from the QCD axion can be responsible for the matter antimatter asymmetry of the universe in the context of cold electroweak (EW) baryogenesis if the EW phase transition is delayed below the GeV scale. This can occur naturally if the Higgs couples to a O(100) GeV dilaton, as expected in some models where the Higgs is a pseudo-Nambu Goldstone boson of a new strongly interacting sector at the TeV scale. The only new relevant ingredients beyond the Standard Model in our framework are the QCD axion and an EW scale dilaton-like scalar field. The existence of such a second scalar resonance with a mass and properties similar to the Higgs boson will soon be tested at the LHC. In this context, the QCD axion would not only solve the strong CP problem, but also the matter anti-matter asymmetry and dark matter.