Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Cosmic-ray interactions in the Earth's atmosphere produce copious secondary mesons, providing a natural laboratory for searches for new physics. We investigate the atmospheric production of axions through the rare kaon decay $K^{+}\rightarrowπ^{+}a$. If sufficiently long-lived, these axions can reach large underground detectors such as Super-Kamiokande and IceCube and decay through the diphoton channel, $a\rightarrowγγ$. Using data from Super-Kamiokande and IceCube, we derive constraints on the axion decay constant $f_a$ for masses up to $m_a\sim 350~\mathrm{MeV}$. We demonstrate that atmospheric kaon decays provide a novel probe of axion parameter space, yielding constraints complementary to existing bounds.
Source: arXiv (Cornell University)
Author: Raza, Tousif
Institution: Oklahoma State University
Language: English
Subfield: Nuclear and High Energy Physics
Field: Physics and Astronomy
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7213948554