Today We Celebrate The Axion

The axion is important for at least three reasons:

• It helps solve the strong-CP problem in Quantum Chromodynamics. (QCD)
• It may solve Dark Matter problems as it is a candidate for Dark Matter.
• It may play a major role in Supersymmetry.

With all being said, today we celebrate the Axion, named by Frank Wilczek after a brand of detergent because it "cleans up" the QCD problem. There is one group that claims they may have detected it. Hopefully they have. It has a fermionic superpartner called the axino and a scalar superpartner called the saxion: also refered to as the diliton.

Here's to a particle that will make major contributions to our understanding of QCD, Dark Matter and Supersymmetry!