{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/constraints-on-axions-from-patchy-screening","title":"Constraints on axions from patchy screening of the cosmic microwave background","arxiv_id":"2409.10514","date":"2024-09-16","proceeding":null,"authors":["Samuel Goldstein","Fiona McCarthy","Cristina Mondino","J. Colin Hill","Junwu Huang","Matthew C. Johnson"],"abstract":"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 $\\textit{Planck}$ CMB observations, we construct maps of axion-induced \"patchy screening\" of the CMB. We cross-correlate these maps with data from the $\\textit{unWISE}$ galaxy survey and find no evidence of axions. We constrain the axion-photon coupling, $g_{a\\gamma\\gamma} \\lesssim 2 \\times 10^{-12}~{\\rm GeV}^{-1}$, at the 95% confidence level for axion masses in the range $10^{-13}~{\\rm eV} \\lesssim m_a \\lesssim 10^{-12}~{\\rm eV}$. 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.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.10514v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.10514v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"constraints-on-axions-from-patchy-screening","repo_url":"https://github.com/LSSTDESC/NaMaster","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}