New techniques reveal spatial signatures of axion-like particles in the cosmic microwave background, suggesting significant discoveries ahead.
The existence of axion-like particles (ALPs) can be probed from their signatures in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) due to the photon-ALP resonant conversion over the mass range of ALPs that matches with the effective mass of photons in the plasma in the astrophysical systems. Such a conversion can also occur in the Milky Way halo and disk and can cause a unique spatial and spectral distortion. The signal is highly non-Gaussian and cannot be measured precisely by the usual power-spectrum approach. We devise a new technique to search for this signal from the upcoming full-sky CMB experiment LiteBIRD using its multi-frequency band using a template-based spatial profile of the ALP distortion signal. This technique captures the large-scale non-Gaussian aspects of the ALP distortion signal in terms of a spatial template and makes it possible to search for any non-zero ALP signal. We show that the inference of the ALP coupling using the template-based technique from LiteBIRD can provide constraints on the coupling constant approximately g aγ < 6.5 × 10 -12 GeV -1 for ALP masses below 10 -14 eV at 95% confidence interval which is an order of magnitude better than the current bounds from CERN Axion Solar Telescope (CAST) at g aγ < 6.6 × 10 -11 GeV -1 , This shows the capability of future multi-band CMB experiment LiteBIRD in opening the discovery space towards physics beyond the standard model.
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Mehta et al. (2025) studied this question.
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