No chiral light bending by clumps of axion-like particles
High Energy Physics - Phenomenology
2019-10-15 v1 Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics
High Energy Physics - Theory
Abstract
We study the propagation of light in the presence of a parity-violating coupling between photons and axion-like particles (ALPs). Naively, this interaction could lead to a split of light rays into two separate beams of different polarization chirality and with different refraction angles. However, by using the eikonal method we explicitly show that this is not the case and that ALP clumps do not produce any spatial birefringence. This happens due to non-trivial variations of the photon's frequency and wavevector, which absorb time-derivatives and gradients of the ALP field. We argue that these variations represent a new way to probe the ALP-photon couping with precision frequency measurements.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1910.06128,
title = {No chiral light bending by clumps of axion-like particles},
author = {Diego Blas and Andrea Caputo and Mikhail M. Ivanov and Laura Sberna},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1910.06128},
year = {2019}
}
Comments
5 pages