2014/12/08 by Meyer, Manuel
#FOS: Physical sciences #High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena (astro-ph.HE) #High Energy Physics - Phenomenology (hep-ph)
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1412.2492
Axion-like particles (ALPs) are a common prediction of certain theories beyond the Standard Model and couple to photons in the presence of external magnetic fields. As a consequence, photon-ALP conversions could lead to an enhancement of the flux of extragalactic gamma-ray sources that is otherwise attenuated due to the interactions with background radiation fields. The magnetic fields traversed by the gamma rays are often turbulent and frequently modelled with a simple domain-like structure. Given a maximum mixing between photons and ALPs, we show that in such models realisations of the fields exist for which the photon-ALP oscillation probability vanishes. This behaviour does not occur in more sophisticated magnetic-field models.