Multiperiod Fermi-LAT and LHAASO constraints on axionlike particles from Mrk 421 data via profile likelihood with Gaussian copula correlations
Phys. Rev. D 114, 083051 – Published 28 October, 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/jw8n-81yg
Abstract
We present a joint multi-period analysis of axionlike particles (ALPs) using five sets of simultaneous Fermi-LAT and LHAASO observations of the TeV blazar Mrk 421. Photon-ALP oscillations are calculated self-consistently together with extragalactic background light (EBL) absorption for two representative jet emission models: a two-zone hybrid model and a single-zone hadronic model. To account for weak correlations among different observational epochs, we adopt a -based profile analysis combined with a Gaussian copula (). Nuisance parameters are optimized under the no-ALP hypothesis before profiling the ALP parameters and . In the low-mass regime () we obtain a 95% CL upper limit of . Over the full mass range 0.1–500 neV, the most conservative 95% CL upper limits are (two zone) and (single zone). Variations of the EBL template, the Galactic and intergalactic magnetic-field models, the spectral binning, and residual instrumental systematics change these limits by only a few percent. The jet magnetic field is the leading systematic and can shift the low-mass bound by a factor of a few; only a substantially weaker single-zone field degrades the constraint by about an order of magnitude. The analysis framework developed here provides a statistically consistent approach for future ALP searches with multimessenger gamma-ray data.