Axion-like particle searches with MeerKAT and SKA

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 previously, due to the inclusion of frequency dependent degradation effects. We show that the strongest potential environment to probe ALPs is nearby radio galaxies (due to the strong photon enhancement factor). In addition, with the use of a visibility taper, ALPs in the mass range of $4.96 \times 10^{-7} \ \text{--} \ 1.04 \times 10^{-4} \ {\rm eV}$ would have non-observation upper limits on the ALP-photon $g_{a\gamma}$ in the range of $1.83 \times 10^{-12} \ \text{--} \ 7.69 \times 10^{-10} \ {\rm GeV}^{-1}$ with SKA. MeerKAT can only produce limits similar to the CAST experiment within 50 hours of observation. Finally, we demonstrate that magnetic conversion of CDM ALPs to photons, in galactic magnetic fields, is highly sub-dominant, even to spontaneous decay.