Papers · William Alexander Aldred

The Strong-CP Census: Every Solution Class for the Small Angle, Its Price, and What the Live Searches Have Already Done to It

Published October 29, 2026 · Zenodo · DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.23780356

About this paper

Quantum chromodynamics allows one more term than nature uses: a dimensionless angle, θ̄, which can sit anywhere from 0 to 2π and is pushed below 10⁻¹⁰ by the neutron electric dipole moment. No symmetry of the Standard Model sets it there. This paper is a census of the ways physics has proposed to pay for that small number, built under the discipline of the charge census in this program: the candidate set closed in advance, each class given its mechanism, its producing test, its price, and its live status against the searches as they stand in October 2026. The closed set has six entries: the Peccei–Quinn axion in its KSVZ family, the same axion in its DFSZ family, the massless up quark, spontaneous CP violation of Nelson–Barr type, parity solutions of left–right type, and the null entry, fine-tuning accepted as a prior cost. The census’s result is a class statement: of the six classes in the closed set, one is dead, two are fully alive and untested in most of their ground, two are alive but cornered, and one is the baseline every other entry must beat. No class in the set is confirmed, and no class except the massless up quark is dead; the massless up quark was killed by lattice QCD at 26 standard deviations, and the axion families — alive in most of their mass range, because the search has covered a few narrow bands, not the range — carry the only producing test running at design sensitivity today. The single measurement that would most change this table is a haloscope detection of the axion at a measured mass and coupling.

Paper 47 of 95 in the published register. The full text is published on Zenodo under a permanent DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.23780356.

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