Beyond The Standard Model electrodynamics in the time domain

TL;DR

This paper develops a flexible simulation code to study non-linear photon-boson interactions in plasma, revealing limitations of the Landau-Zener approximation in complex astrophysical scenarios.

Contribution

The authors introduce a novel 3+1 formalism code for non-linear simulations of photon and ultralight boson systems in plasma, surpassing traditional approximations.

Findings

Landau-Zener approximation breaks down in multiple level crossings.

Non-linear effects become significant when plasma varies rapidly.

Code can be extended to three-dimensional and more complex systems.

Abstract

Many motivated extensions of the standard model include new light bosons, such as axions and dark photons, which can mix with the ordinary photon. This latter, when in a dilute plasma, can be dressed by an effective plasma mass. If this is equal to the mass of the new degree of freedom, then a resonance takes place and the probability of transition between states is enhanced. This phenomenon of resonance conversion is at the very basis of multiple probes of dark matter, and it is typically studied within the so-called Landau-Zener approximation for level crossings. This latter is known to break down in a variety of scenarios, such as multiple level crossings or when the de Broglie wave length of the new boson is comparable to the scale over which the background plasma varies. We develop a flexible code adopting a 3+1 formalism in flat spacetime to perform non-linear simulations of systems with photons and new ultralight bosons in the presence of plasma. Our code currently allows to evolve one-dimensional systems, which are the ones of interest for this first study, but can be easily extended to treat three-dimensional spaces, and can be adapted to describe a plethora of realistic astrophysical and cosmological situations. Here we use it to study the breakdown of the Landau-Zener approximation in the case of multiple level crossings and when the slowly-varying plasma approximation ceases to be valid. In this first paper we detail our code and use it to study non-turbulent plasma, where small scale fluctuations can be neglected; their treatment will be considered in an upcoming publication.