Hunting for Extragalactic Axion-like Dark Matter in a Decade-long Blazar Optical Polarimetry

TL;DR

This study used a decade of optical polarimetry data from a blazar to search for axion-like particle signatures, setting new limits on their properties and demonstrating the method's effectiveness for extragalactic dark matter research.

Contribution

First long-term optical polarimetry search for ALP-induced polarization oscillations, providing competitive constraints on ALP-photon coupling over a broad mass range.

Findings

No significant periodicity detected in polarization data.

Set upper limits on ALP-photon coupling constant.

Constraints surpass previous VLBA and pulsar timing bounds.

Abstract

Axions or axion-like particles (ALPs) are well-motivated dark matter (DM) candidates whose coupling to photons induces periodic oscillations in the polarization angle of astrophysical light. This work reports the first search for such a signature using ten years of optical polarimetric monitoring of the blazar 1ES 1959+650. No statistically significant periodicity is detected using a Lomb-Scargle periodogram and Monte Carlo analysis. Assuming a central DM density in the host galaxy, this null result places tight upper limits on the ALP-photon coupling constant at $g_{a\gamma}<(5.8 \times 10^{-14}-1.8\times 10^{-10})\,\mathrm{GeV}^{-1}$ across a broad ALP mass range of $m_a \sim (1.4\times10^{-23}-5.2\times10^{-20})\,\mathrm{eV}$. Our constraints surpass those from Very Long Baseline Array polarimetry of active galactic jets and are competitive with those from long-term Galactic pulsar timing of PSR J0437-4715 over the same ALP mass window. These results establish long-term blazar polarimetry as a competitive and complementary approach for probing axion-like DM on extragalactic scales.