Particle Physics on the Plains​ 2023

Probing axion dark matter with radio waves

14 Oct 2023, 17:21

18m

2048 Malott Hall (University of Kansas)

Beyond the Standard Model

Speaker

Takuya Okawa

Description

Axions with masses around $\mu eV$ could account for dark matter in the universe. However, their small couplings with SM particles make it demanding to detect their signatures. In the presence of background photons, the decay rate of an axion to two photons is increased due to Bose enhancement, which could enhance the decay rate by a factor of millions. In this talk, we will discuss axion decays stimulated by background Galactic, extra-Galactic, and CMB photons and the possibility of detecting their decay products, radio photons, by the Square Kilometre Array. We compute the signal-to-noise ratio in all directions in the sky to estimate the best direction to observe for two realistic axion dark matter profiles, the Navarro-Frenk-White profile and the Burkert profile.

Presentation materials

ppp_2023_okawa.pdf