Suvam Maharana (Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai) - Clockwork Exotica: some reflections on the clockwork mechanism and its applications

Thursday 16 Oct 2025, 15:30 → 16:30 Europe/Stockholm

92110 or https://uu-se.zoom.us/j/64005722466?pwd=IIU0GuNIi7mWJOrswHj6taeV0zDxVd.

Clockwork is a relatively new mechanism for generating hierarchies in mass scales and/or couplings in a theory without invoking any small parameters. This is achieved naturally by introducing a sector of multiple copies of a field and that of a symmetry that is partially broken by a particular form of nearest neighbour interactions. This defines a theory space lattice whose physical spectrum then consists of a massless state that is localized on the lattice and a tower of massive states that are delocalized. The feature of localization is what facilitates the generation of hierarchies in the effective couplings with the clockwork sector. In this talk, I will give a brief overview of the mechanism and discuss a few possible theoretical extensions, as well as some phenomenological applications of the mechanism in the context of the QCD axion, neutrino masses and leptogenesis.