Axion-like particle searches with MeerKAT and SKA
Ahmed Ayad, Geoff Beck

TL;DR
This paper assesses the potential of upcoming radio telescopes like SKA and MeerKAT to detect axion-like particles through their decay into photons, revealing that realistic sensitivity estimates weaken previous optimistic projections and highlighting the importance of environment and frequency effects.
Contribution
It provides a realistic analysis of ALP detectability with SKA and MeerKAT, incorporating sensitivity degradation and environmental factors, and compares these limits to existing experiments.
Findings
Previous SKA limits were overly optimistic by an order of magnitude.
Nearby radio galaxies are the most promising environments for ALP detection.
MeerKAT's sensitivity is comparable to CAST within 50 hours of observation.
Abstract
In the past few years, the search for axion-like particles (ALPs) has grown significantly due to their potential to account for the total abundance of the cold dark matter (CDM) in the universe. The coupling between ALPs and photons allows the spontaneous decay of ALPs into pairs of photons. For ALPs condensed in CDM halos around galaxies, the stimulated decay of ALPs is also possible. In this work, we examine the detectability of the radio emissions produced from this process with forthcoming radio telescopes such as the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) and MeerKAT. Our results, using recent more realistic sensitivity estimates, show that previous non-observation upper-limits projected for the SKA were highly optimistic, with the limits from dwarf galaxy observations being weakened by an order of magnitude at least. Notably, our results also depend far more strongly on ALP mass than…
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