Revisiting Constraints on Resonant Axion-Photon Conversions from CMB Spectral Distortions

TL;DR

This paper refines constraints on axion-photon resonant conversions affecting CMB spectral distortions by improving modeling, including Helium recombination effects, and exploring large-distortion regimes to probe new axion parameter space.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed plasma mass model, an updated analytic framework, and a numeric approach using CosmoTherm to better characterize axion-induced CMB spectral distortions, especially in large-distortion regimes.

Findings

Helium recombination significantly alters photon conversion probabilities.

Updated models slightly tighten constraints on axion parameters.

Large-distortion regimes enable probing previously inaccessible axion space.

Abstract

Axions and axion-like particles (ALPs) remain highly motivated extensions to the standard model due to their ability to address open questions such as the relic abundance of dark matter and the strong CP problem. Axions are also capable of undergoing a resonant mixing with photons when the masses of the two fields are roughly equal, producing a wide array of phenomenological consequences. Here, we revisit constraints coming from conversions of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) into axions, which will induce a distortion to the frequency spectrum of the background photons. We introduce a more detailed description for the modeling of the plasma mass of the photon, showcasing how the inclusion of Helium recombination can alter the conversion probability for photons in the Wien tail. Our results include an updated analytic framework, which allows us to define the precise spectral shape of the axion distortion, as well as a numeric component which utilized the code \texttt{CosmoTherm} to fully characterize the distortion, providing a slight increase in the constraining power over the analytics. We also treat for the first time the large-distortion regime for resonant axion-photon conversions. Under the assumption of large-scale primordial magnetic fields near the limit obtained from CMB observations, we find that spectral distortions can probe previously unexplored regions of the axion parameter space.