Generalized Ray Tracing for Axions in Astrophysical Plasmas

Understand

Ray tracing plays a vital role in black hole imaging, modeling the emission mechanisms of pulsars, and deriving signatures from physics beyond the Standard Model.

• In this work we focus on one specific application of ray tracing, namely, predicting radio signals generated from the resonant conversion of axion dark matter in the strongly magnetized plasma surrounding neutron stars.
• The production and propagation of low-energy photons in these environments are sensitive to both the anisotropic response of the background plasma and curved spacetime; here, we employ a fully covariant framework capable of treating both effects.
• We implement this both via forward and backward ray tracing.