2024/09/16 by Goldstein, Samuel, McCarthy, Fiona, Mondino, Cristina +3 · 1 citation
#Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics (astro-ph.CO) #FOS: Physical sciences #High Energy Physics - Phenomenology (hep-ph)
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2409.10514
The resonant conversion of cosmic microwave background (CMB) photons into axions within large-scale structure induces an anisotropic spectral distortion in CMB temperature maps. Applying state-of-the-art foreground cleaning techniques to Planck CMB observations, we construct maps of axion-induced "patchy screening" of the CMB. We cross-correlate these maps with data from the unWISE galaxy survey and find no evidence of axions. We constrain the axion-photon coupling, gaγγ \lesssim 2 × 10-12~\rm GeV-1, at the 95% confidence level for axion masses in the range 10-13~\rm eV \lesssim ma \lesssim 10-12~\rm eV. These constraints are competitive with the tightest astrophysical axion limits in this mass range and are inferred from robust population-level statistics, which makes them complementary to existing searches that rely on modeling of individual systems.