Searching for axionlike time-dependent cosmic birefringence with data from SPT-3G

Ferguson, R. K., SPT-3G Collaboration and Tucker, Carole ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1851-3918 2022. Searching for axionlike time-dependent cosmic birefringence with data from SPT-3G. Physical Review D 106 , 042011. 10.1103/PhysRevD.106.042011

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Abstract

Ultralight axionlike particles (ALPs) are compelling dark matter candidates because of their potential to resolve small-scale discrepancies between Λ CDM predictions and cosmological observations. Axion-photon coupling induces a polarization rotation in linearly polarized photons traveling through an ALP field; thus, as the local ALP dark matter field oscillates in time, distant static polarized sources will appear to oscillate with a frequency proportional to the ALP mass. We use observations of the cosmic microwave background from SPT-3G, the current receiver on the South Pole Telescope, to set upper limits on the value of the axion-photon coupling constant g_{ϕ γ} over the approximate mass range 10^-22- 10^-19 eV , corresponding to oscillation periods from 12 hours to 100 days. For periods between 1 and 100 days (4.7 ×10^-22 eV ≤m_ϕ≤4.7 ×10^-20 eV ), where the limit is approximately constant, we set a median 95% C.L. upper limit on the amplitude of on-sky polarization rotation of 0.071 deg. Assuming that dark matter comprises a single ALP species with a local dark matter density of 0.3 GeV /cm³ , this corresponds to g_{ϕ γ}<1.18 ×10^-12 GeV^-1×(m/_ϕ 1.0 ×10^-21 eV ) . These new limits represent an improvement over the previous strongest limits set using the same effect by a factor of ∼3.8 ....

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Published Online
Status:	Published
Schools:	Schools > Physics and Astronomy
ISSN:	0556-2821
Date of Acceptance:	15 July 2022
Last Modified:	13 Feb 2023 13:08
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/156650

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