Axion luminosity of Active Galactic Nuclei

TL;DR

This paper calculates axion and pseudoscalar fluxes from Active Galactic Nuclei, finding negligible axion luminosity but potential pseudoscalar flux exceeding photons under certain conditions, with implications for optical polarization alignments.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed computation of axion and pseudoscalar emissions from AGNs, highlighting conditions where pseudoscalar flux can surpass photon flux.

Findings

Axion luminosity from AGNs is negligible compared to photon luminosity.

Pseudoscalar flux can exceed photon flux in certain parameter ranges.

Implications for large-scale optical polarization alignments from AGNs.

Abstract

We compute the flux of axions from Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN). Axions can be produced in the accretion disk by the Compton, Bremsstrahlung and Primakoff processes. We find that the axion luminosity due to these processes is negligible in comparison to the photon luminosity from AGNs. We also compute the luminosity of a hypothetical pseudoscalar, with very small mass, from the AGN atmosphere due to the phenomenon of pseudoscalar-photon mixing in background magnetic field. In this case we find that for some parameter ranges, the pseudoscalar flux can exceed that of photons. We comment on the implications of this result on the observed large scale alignment of optical polarizations from AGNs.