BICEP/$Keck$ XIV: Improved constraints on axionlike polarization oscillations in the cosmic microwave background

BICEP/ $K e c k$ XIV: Improved constraints on axionlike polarization oscillations in the cosmic microwave background

P. A. R. Ade et al. (BICEP/Keck Collaboration)

Phys. Rev. D 105, 022006 – Published 28 January 2022

Abstract

We present an improved search for axionlike polarization oscillations in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) with observations from the Keck Array. An all-sky, temporally sinusoidal rotation of CMB polarization, equivalent to a time-variable cosmic birefringence, is an observable manifestation of a local axion field and potentially allows a CMB polarimeter to detect axionlike dark matter directly. We describe improvements to the method presented in previous work, and we demonstrate the updated method with an expanded dataset consisting of the 2012–2015 observing seasons. We set limits on the axion-photon coupling constant for mass $m$ in the range $10^{- 23} - 10^{- 18} eV$ , which corresponds to oscillation periods on the order of hours to years. Our results are consistent with the background model. For periods between 1 and 30 d ( $1.6 \times 10^{- 21} \leq m \leq 4.8 \times 10^{- 20} eV$ ), the 95%-confidence upper limits on rotation amplitude are approximately constant with a median of 0.27°, which constrains the axion-photon coupling constant to $g_{ϕ γ} < (4.5 \times 10^{- 12} {GeV}^{- 1}) m / (10^{- 21} eV)$ , if axionlike particles constitute all of the dark matter. More than half of the collected BICEP dataset has yet to be analyzed, and several current and future CMB polarimetry experiments can apply the methods presented here to achieve comparable or superior constraints. In the coming years, oscillation measurements can achieve the sensitivity to rule out unexplored regions of the axion parameter space.

Received 13 August 2021
Accepted 11 January 2022

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.105.022006

Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

Cosmic microwave background Dark matter

Axions

Particles & FieldsGravitation, Cosmology & Astrophysics

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$BICEP / K e c k$ XII: Constraints on axionlike polarization oscillations in the cosmic microwave background

P. A. R. Ade et al. (BICEP/Keck Collaboration)

Phys. Rev. D 103, 042002 (2021)

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Vol. 105, Iss. 2 — 15 January 2022

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Figure 1
The test statistic $Δ q_{m}$ for consistency with the background model [BK-XII Eq. (67)] for real data from the 2012–2015 observing seasons of the Keck Array. We plot $Δ q_{m}^{1 / 4}$ on the vertical axis in order to compress the distribution for visual purposes, and we plot frequency $m / (2 π)$ in units of inverse days ( $d^{- 1}$ ) on the horizontal axis. The maximum and minimum values are indicated in the legend with their corresponding oscillation periods. the levels for global $2.5 σ$ fluctuations in both directions are indicated by horizontal red lines; i.e., there is a 1.2% probability in the background model that at least one value of $Δ q_{m}$ will lie outside the region bounded by the red lines. The visible gap at frequency $1 / 365 d^{- 1}$ represents an intentional avoidance range (Sec. 3g).
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Figure 2
Bayesian 95%-confidence upper limits on rotation amplitude $A / 2$ (BK-XII Sec. 4c). We also provide the median expectation (black dashes) from background-only simulations as well as $1 σ$ (green) and $2 σ$ (yellow) regions. These expectations represent local rather than global percentiles. With nearly $5 \times 10^{4}$ frequencies under consideration, we expect several values outside of the $2 σ$ region. Background consistency is addressed in Sec. 4d and Fig. 1. The median limit for oscillation periods between 1 and 30d is 0.27°. For shorter periods (larger frequencies), the limits are degraded due to binning observations in $\sim 1$ -hr scansets (BK-XII Sec. 3c). For longer periods (smaller frequencies), the limits are degraded due to the residual oscillation in the coadded maps (Sec. 3d). The breaks in the data are due to the avoidance frequencies discussed in Sec. 3g. Additionally, we plot a smoothed approximation to our upper limits Eq. (14) in cyan.
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Figure 3
Excluded regions in the mass-coupling parameter space for axionlike dark matter (cf. BK-XII Fig. 6 [1]). All constraints push the allowed regions to larger masses and smaller coupling constants, i.e., toward the bottom right of the figure. If the dark matter is assumed to consist entirely axionlike particles, i.e., if $κ = 1$ , then our constraints (blue) are immediately implied by Eq. (4) of BK-XII and the results of Fig. 2. A smoothed approximation is shown in cyan [Eq. (15)]. The analogous limits and smoothed approximation from BK-XII are shown in purple and magenta. The orange dot-dashed and dotted lines show the constraints that would be achieved if the rotation amplitude were constrained to 0.1° and 0.01°, respectively. The green solid line shows the constraint set by Fedderke et al. [9] from the washout effect (BK-XII Sec. 1) in Planck power spectra. The dashed green line shows the cosmic-variance limit for the washout effect. The dashed grey horizontal line shows the limit from the lack of a gamma-ray excess from SN1987A [17]. The solid grey horizontal line is the limit set by the CAST experiment [25]. The dotted grey vertical line is a constraint on the minimum axion mass from observations of small-scale structure in the Lyman- $α$ forest [27], and we note that several similar bounds have also been set by other considerations of small-scale structure [28, 29, 30, 31].
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