TY - JOUR
T1 - Stochastic properties of ultralight scalar field gradients
AU - Lisanti, Mariangela
AU - Moschella, Matthew
AU - Terrano, William
N1 - Funding Information:
U.S. Department of Energy Simons Foundation Princeton University Princeton Institute for Computational Science and Engineering
Funding Information:
We thank I. Bloch, K. Blum, J. Foster, Y. Hochberg, L. Hui, E. Kuflik, J. Lee, M. Romalis, B. Safdi, and T. Volansky for useful conversations. M. L. is supported by the DOE under Award No. DESC0007968. M. M. is supported by the Simons Foundation. W. T. is supported by the Simons Foundation and the Princeton University Dicke Fellowship. The work presented in this paper was performed on computational resources managed and supported by Princeton Research Computing, a consortium of groups including the Princeton Institute for Computational Science and Engineering (PICSciE) and the Office of Information Technology’s High Performance Computing Center and Visualization Laboratory at Princeton University. This research made use of the numpy , scipy , matplotlib , and astropy software packages.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 American Physical Society
PY - 2021/9/1
Y1 - 2021/9/1
N2 - Ultralight axionlike particles are well-motivated dark matter candidates that are the target of numerous direct detection efforts. In the vicinity of the Solar System, such particles can be treated as oscillating scalar fields. The velocity dispersion of the Milky Way determines a coherence time of about oscillations, beyond which the amplitude of the axion field fluctuates stochastically. Any analysis of data from an axion direct detection experiment must carefully account for this stochastic behavior to properly interpret the results. This is especially true for experiments sensitive to the gradient of the axion field that are unable to collect data for many coherence times. Indeed, the direction, in addition to the amplitude, of the axion field gradient fluctuates stochastically. We present the first complete stochastic treatment for the gradient of the axion field, including multiple computationally efficient methods for performing likelihood-based data analysis, which can be applied to any axion signal, regardless of coherence time. Additionally, we demonstrate that ignoring the stochastic behavior of the gradient of the axion field can potentially result in failure to discover a true axion signal.
AB - Ultralight axionlike particles are well-motivated dark matter candidates that are the target of numerous direct detection efforts. In the vicinity of the Solar System, such particles can be treated as oscillating scalar fields. The velocity dispersion of the Milky Way determines a coherence time of about oscillations, beyond which the amplitude of the axion field fluctuates stochastically. Any analysis of data from an axion direct detection experiment must carefully account for this stochastic behavior to properly interpret the results. This is especially true for experiments sensitive to the gradient of the axion field that are unable to collect data for many coherence times. Indeed, the direction, in addition to the amplitude, of the axion field gradient fluctuates stochastically. We present the first complete stochastic treatment for the gradient of the axion field, including multiple computationally efficient methods for performing likelihood-based data analysis, which can be applied to any axion signal, regardless of coherence time. Additionally, we demonstrate that ignoring the stochastic behavior of the gradient of the axion field can potentially result in failure to discover a true axion signal.
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U2 - 10.1103/PhysRevD.104.055037
DO - 10.1103/PhysRevD.104.055037
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85115984186
SN - 2470-0010
VL - 104
JO - Physical Review D
JF - Physical Review D
IS - 5
M1 - 055037
ER -