Electric Current and Heat Production by a Neutral Carrier: An Effect of the Axion

TL;DR

This paper explores how axions, despite being electrically neutral, can induce electric currents and heat production in a dielectric environment under strong magnetic fields, revealing a novel thermodynamic effect with potential accumulative properties.

Contribution

It introduces a phenomenological axion-electrodynamic formalism and demonstrates heat generation by axions in a magnetic field, a nontrivial effect not previously detailed.

Findings

Axions induce oscillating electric currents in a magnetic field.

Heat production occurs with magnetic fields but not electric fields.

The effect is accumulative and influences axion thermodynamics.

Abstract

A general axion-electrodynamic formalism is presented on the phenomenological level when the environment is dielectric (permittivity and permeability assumed to be constants). Thereafter, a strong and uniform magnetic field is considered in the $z$ direction, the field region having the form of a long material cylinder (which corresponds to the haloscope setup). If the axion amplitude depends on time only, the axions give rise to an oscillating electric current in the $z$ direction. We estimate the magnitudes of the azimuthal magnetic fields and the accompanying Joule heating in the cylinder, taking the cylinder to have ordinary dissipative properties. We evaluate and calculate the electric current and the heat production separately, without using the effective approximation, both when there is a strong magnetic field and when there is a strong electric one, showing that with the magnetic field there is a heat production, while with the electric field there is not. The heat generation that we consider, is a nontrivial effect as it is generated by the electrically neutral axions, and has obvious consequences for axion thermodynamics. The heat production can moreover have an additional advantage, since the effect is accumulative and so grows with time. The boundary conditions (in a classical sense) are explained and the use of them in a quantum mechanical context is discussed. This point is nontrivial, accentuated in particular in connection with the Casimir effect. For comparison purposes, we present finally some results for heat dissipation taken from the theory of viscous cosmology.