- Accepted Paper
Broadband constraints on axionlike particle dark matter from the Coma cluster radio halo and prospects for the SKA
Phys. Rev. D - Accepted 26 October, 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/97vm-tftt
Phys. Rev. D - Accepted 26 October, 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/97vm-tftt
We present upper limits on the axion-like particle (ALP) photon coupling constant $\gagg$ from a broadband spectral analysis of the Coma cluster (Abell~1656) radio halo. We have used flux density measurements spanning 30.9,MHz to 6.6,GHz, which probe ALP masses from $0.26,\muev$ to $55.9,\muev$, the widest continuous mass coverage from any single cluster to date. We model the synchrotron foreground with the physically motivated in-situ reacceleration spectrum, which provides a substantially better description of the strongly curved Coma halo spectrum than the simple power law adequate for the Bullet cluster. We adopt an aperture-matched profile-likelihood analysis as our primary statistical estimator, fitting the full 23-point radio spectrum simultaneously at each tested axion mass. For the more robust CMB-only and CMB plus extragalactic radio background (ERB) photon baths, our conservative baseline upper endpoints at $\ma=55.9,\muev$ are both $\simeq4.35\times10^{-8}\,\GeV^{-1}$. If the ICM kinetic temperature is additionally used as a Rayleigh–Jeans photon occupation following Ref.~, the same analysis gives $\gagg<7.33\times10^{-12}\,\GeV^{-1}$; we retain this much stronger value only as a conditional model benchmark and not as a robust constraint for the optically thin ICM. We further forecast the sensitivity achievable with the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) in its high-frequency bands. For an ideal 100,h SKA-MID Band~5b observation near band centre, the same thermal-noise calculation gives $\gagg\simeq4.5\times10^{-9}\,\GeV^{-1}$ for the CMB-only and CMB+ERB baselines, whereas the conditional ICM kinetic-temperature prescription gives $\gagg\sim7.5\times10^{-13}\,\GeV^{-1}$. A systematic comparison across 14 galaxy clusters demonstrates that the luminosity distance to the observer is the dominant figure of merit, with the nearby Ophiuchus cluster () emerging as the premier SKA-MID target in the same conditional forecast, at a projected limit of $\gagg\sim2.70\times10^{-13},\GeV^{-1}$.
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