Sensitivity of JWST to eV-Scale Decaying Axion Dark Matter

• DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2311.04987
• Publication Date: 2023-01-01
• Authors: Sandip Roy; Carlos Blanco; Christopher Dessert; Anirudh Prabhu; Tea Temim
• Keywords: High Energy Physics - Phenomenology; High Energy Physics - Phenomenology (hep-ph); Astrophysics of Galaxies (astro-ph.GA); FOS: Physical sciences; 7. Clean energy; Astrophysics - Astrophysics of Galaxies

The recently-launched James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) can resolve eV-scale emission lines arising from dark matter (DM) decay. We forecast the end-of-mission sensitivity to decay of axions, a leading DM candidate, in Milky Way using blank-sky observations expected during standard operations. Searching for unassociated will constrain axions mass range $0.18$ eV $2.6$ with axion-photon couplings $g_{a\gamma\gamma}\gtrsim 5.5 \times 10^{-12}$ GeV$^{-1}$. In particular, these results astrophobic QCD masses $\lesssim$ 0.2 eV.