English

Constraints on non-resonant photon-axion conversion from the Planck satellite data

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2019-06-17 v2 High Energy Physics - Phenomenology High Energy Physics - Theory

Abstract

The non-resonant conversion of Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) photons into scalar as well as light pseudoscalar particles such as axion-like particles (ALPs) in the presence of turbulent magnetic fields can cause a unique, spatially fluctuating spectral distortion in the CMB. We use the publicly available Planck temperature maps for the frequency channels (70-545 GHz) to obtain the first ALP distortion map using 45%45\% clean part of the sky. The 95th95^{th} percentile upper limit on the RMS fluctuation of ALP distortions from the cleanest part of the CMB sky at 1515 arcmin angular resolution is 18.5×10618.5 \times 10^{-6}. The RMS fluctuation in the distortion map is also consistent with different combinations of frequency channels and sky-fractions.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1811.11177,
  title  = {Constraints on non-resonant photon-axion conversion from the Planck satellite data},
  author = {Suvodip Mukherjee and Rishi Khatri and Benjamin D. Wandelt},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1811.11177},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

12 pages and 4 figures. Matches the published version