Searching for axionlike time-dependent cosmic birefringence with data from SPT-3G

• Published in: Physical Review D
• Main Authors: Ferguson, K.R., Anderson, A.J., Whitehorn, N., Ade, P.A.R., Archipley, M., Avva, J.S., Balkenhol, L., Benabed, K., Bender, A.N., Benson, B.A., Bianchini, F., Bleem, L.E., Bouchet, F.R., Camphuis, E., Carlstrom, J.E., Cecil, T.W., Chang, C.L., Chaubal, P., Chichura, P.M., Chou, T.-L., Crawford, T.M., Cukierman, A., Daley, C., de Haan, T., Dibert, K., Dobbs, M.A., Dutcher, D., Everett, W., Feng, C., Foster, A., Galli, S., Gambrel, A.E., Gardner, R.W., Goeckner-Wald, N., Gualtieri, R., Guns, S., Halverson, N.W., Hivon, E., Holder, G.P., Holzapfel, W.L., Hood, J.C., Huang, N., Knox, L., Korman, M., Kuo, C.-L., Lee, A.T., Lowitz, A.E., Lu, C., Millea, M., Montgomery, J., Natoli, T., Noble, G.I., Novosad, V., Omori, Y., Padin, S., Pan, Z., Prabhu, K., Quan, W., Rahlin, A., Reichardt, C.L., Rouble, M., Ruhl, J.E., Schiappucci, E., Smecher, G., Sobrin, J.A., Suzuki, A., Tandoi, C., Thompson, K.L., Thorne, B., Tucker, C., Umilta, C., Vieira, J.D., Wang, G., Wu, W.L.K., Yefremenko, V., Young, M.R.
• Other Authors: Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris (IAP), Institut national des sciences de l'Univers (INSU - CNRS)-Sorbonne Université (SU)-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), SPT-3G
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: HAL CCSD 2022
• Subjects: polarization: rotation; dark matter: density; GeV; coupling constant; birefringence; cosmic background radiation; photon: coupling; axion-like particles; pole; time dependence; oscillation; cosmological model; polarization: linear; [PHYS.ASTR]Physics [physics]/Astrophysics [astro-ph]; [PHYS.HEXP]Physics [physics]/High Energy Physics - Experiment [hep-ex]; South Pole; South pole
• Online Access: https://hal.science/hal-03632659; https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.106.042011

International audience Ultralight axionlike particles (ALPs) are compelling dark matter candidates because of their potential to resolve small-scale discrepancies between Λ CDM predictions and cosmological observations. Axion-photon coupling induces a polarization rotation in linearly polarized photons traveling through an ALP field; thus, as the local ALP dark matter field oscillates in time, distant static polarized sources will appear to oscillate with a frequency proportional to the ALP mass. We use observations of the cosmic microwave background from SPT-3G, the current receiver on the South Pole Telescope, to set upper limits on the value of the axion-photon coupling constant g ϕ γ over the approximate mass range 10 - 22 – 10 - 19 eV , corresponding to oscillation periods from 12 hours to 100 days. For periods between 1 and 100 days ( 4.7 × 10 - 22 eV ≤ m ϕ ≤ 4.7 × 10 - 20 eV ), where the limit is approximately constant, we set a median 95% C.L. upper limit on the amplitude of on-sky polarization rotation of 0.071 deg. Assuming that dark matter comprises a single ALP species with a local dark matter density of 0.3 GeV / cm 3 , this corresponds to g ϕ γ < 1.18 × 10 - 12 GeV - 1 × ( m ϕ 1.0 × 10 - 21 eV ) . These new limits represent an improvement over the previous strongest limits set using the same effect by a factor of ∼ 3.8 .