Published for SISSA by Springer Received: April 13, 2018 Accepted: June 5, 2018 Published: June 8, 2018 Constraining axion-like-particles with hard X-ray emission from magnetars JHEP06(2018)048 Jean-Fran¸coisFortina and Kuver Sinhab aD´epartement de Physique, de G´eniePhysique et d'Optique, Universit´eLaval, 2325 Rue de l'Universit´e,Qu´ebec, QC G1V 0A6, Canada bDepartment of Physics and Astronomy, University of Oklahoma, 440 W. Brooks St., Norman, OK 73019, U.S.A. E-mail:
[email protected],
[email protected] Abstract: Axion-like particles (ALPs) produced in the core of a magnetar will convert to photons in the magnetosphere, leading to possible signatures in the hard X-ray band. We perform a detailed calculation of the ALP-to-photon conversion probability in the magneto- sphere, recasting the coupled differential equations that describe ALP-photon propagation into a form that is efficient for large scale numerical scans. We show the dependence of the conversion probability on the ALP energy, mass, ALP-photon coupling, magnetar radius, surface magnetic field, and the angle between the magnetic field and direction of propa- gation. Along the way, we develop an analytic formalism to perform similar calculations in more general n-state oscillation systems. Assuming ALP emission rates from the core that are just subdominant to neutrino emission, we calculate the resulting constraints on the ALP mass versus ALP-photon coupling space, taking SGR 1806-20 as an example. In particular, we take benchmark values for the magnetar radius and core temperature, and constrain the ALP parameter space by the requirement that the luminosity from ALP- to-photon conversion should not exceed the total observed luminosity from the magnetar.