Magnetized matter effects on dilaton photon mixing

Dilatons ($\phi(x)$) are a class of bosonic scalar particles associated with scaling symmetry and its compensation (under the violations of the same). Due to two photon coupling, they can produce optical signatures in a magnetic field. In vacuum or plain matter they couple to one of the transversely polarized state of the photon. But in a magnetized matter, they couple to both the transversely polarized state of photon (due to emergence of a parity violating part of photon self energy contribution from a magnetized matter). A part of this work is directed towards understanding the issue of mixing of scalar with various polarizations states of photon in a medium ( magnetized or unmagnetized ) due to the constraints from different discrete (CPT) symmetries associated with the interaction. Based on these symmetry aided arguments, the structure of the mixing matrix is found to be $3 \times 3$. Thus there exists non-zero finite probabilities of oscillation between different polarization states of photon to dilaton. Our analytical and numerical analysis show no existence of periodic oscillation length either in temporal or spatial direction for most general values of the parameters in the theory. Possible astrophysical consequences of these results, those can be detected through observations are discussed.

Ankur Chaubey, Manoj K. Jaiswal, Avijit K. Ganguly · 2022