Constraining the photon-axion coupling constant with magnetic white dwarfs
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The light pseudoscalar particle, dubbed the axion, borne out of the Peccei-Quinn solution to the strong $CP$ problem in QCD remains elusive. One avenue of inferring its existence is through its coupling to electromagnetic radiation. So far, laboratory experiments have dedicated all efforts to detect the axion in the mass range ${10}^{\ensuremath{-}6}<{m}_{a}<{10}^{\ensuremath{-}3}\text{ }\text{ }\mathrm{eV}$ with a photon-axion coupling strength ${g}_{a\ensuremath{\gamma}\ensuremath{\gamma}}<{10}^{\ensuremath{-}10}\text{ }\text{ }{\mathrm{GeV}}^{\ensuremath{-}1}$, where the limits are derived from astrophysical considerations. In this study, we present a novel way of constraining ${g}_{a\ensuremath{\gamma}\ensuremath{\gamma}}$ by looking at the level of linear polarization in the radiation emerging from magnetic white dwarfs. We find that photon-axion oscillations in white dwarf magnetospheres can enhance the degree of linear polarization. Observing that most magnetic white dwarfs show only 5% linear polarization, we derive upper limits on ${g}_{a\ensuremath{\gamma}\ensuremath{\gamma}}$ for different axion masses.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".