The Atacama Cosmology Telescope: Probing new signatures of ultralight axions with gravitational lensing

Abstract

Ultralight axions (ULAs) are well-motivated dark matter particle candidates that arise in many extensions of the Standard Model of particle physics. ULAs with mass $m_\mathrm{a} \lesssim 10^{-27}$ eV have been strongly constrained by cosmic microwave background (CMB) observations in temperature and polarization. We fit recent measurements of gravitational lensing of the CMB from \textit{Planck}, the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) and the South Pole Telescope (SPT-3G) using a state-of-the-art simulation-calibrated nonlinear clustering model for ULAs. We derive the strongest constraints on ULAs in the mass range $10^{-26}\;\mathrm{eV}\leq m_\mathrm{a}\leq 10^{-24.5}\;\mathrm{eV}$. ULAs of this mass have been shown to alleviate tensions between inferences of the matter clustering if they compose a few percent of the total dark matter content of the Universe. We conclude that ULAs with a mass of $10^{-26}$ eV make up less than 1.5\% of the dark matter and $10^{-25}$ eV axions make less than 9\% (both at 95\% confidence level). We identify a slight preference for non-zero axion density at $10^{-24.5}$ eV at $2.1σ$. We find that the preference for ULAs is largely driven by a few data points and that further investigation of non-linear ULA physics is needed to confirm or rule out this signal.