The recently-launched James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) can resolve eV-scale emission lines arising from dark matter (DM) decay. We forecast the end-of-mission sensitivity to the decay of axions, a leading DM candidate, in the Milky Way using the blank-sky observations expected during standard operations. Searching for unassociated emission lines will constrain axions in the mass range 0.18 eV to 2.6 eV with axion-photon couplings gaγγ≳5.5×10−12 GeV−1. In particular, these results will constrain astrophobic QCD axions to masses ≲ 0.2 eV.
@article{arxiv.2311.04987,
title = {Sensitivity of JWST to eV-Scale Decaying Axion Dark Matter},
author = {Sandip Roy and Carlos Blanco and Christopher Dessert and Anirudh Prabhu and Tea Temim},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2311.04987},
year = {2023}
}
Comments
7 pages, 2 figures, 4 pages of Supplemental Material (6 figures)