Low-scale axion from large extra dimensions

The mass of the axion and its decay rate are known to depend only on the scale of Peccei–Quinn symmetry breaking, which is constrained by astrophysics and cosmology to be between 10⁹ and 10¹² GeV. We propose a new mechanism such that this effective scale is preserved and yet the fundamental breaking scale of U(1)_PQ is very small (a kind of inverse seesaw) in the context of large extra dimensions with an anomalous U(1) gauge symmetry in our brane. The production and decay of the associated Z_A gauge boson, which ends up as two gluons and two axions, is a distinct collider signature of this scenario.