2023ApJ...951....5S

Axion-like particles (ALPs) are well-motivated extensions of the Standard Model of Particle Physics and a generic prediction of some string theories. X-ray observations of bright active galactic nuclei (AGNs) hosted by rich clusters of galaxies are excellent probes of very-light ALPs, with masses $\mathrm{log}({m}_{{\rm{a}}}/\mathrm{eV})\lt -12.0$. We evaluate the potential of future X-ray observatories, particularly Athena and the proposed AXIS, to constrain ALPs via observations of cluster-hosted AGNs, taking NGC 1275 in the Perseus cluster as our exemplar. Assuming perfect knowledge of the instrument calibration, we show that a modest exposure (200 ks) of NGC 1275 by Athena permits us to exclude all photon-ALP couplings g_aγ > 6.3 × 10^–14 GeV^–1 at the 95% confidence level, as previously shown by Conlon et al., representing a factor of 10 improvement over current limits. We then proceed to assess the impact of realistic calibration uncertainties on the Athena projection by applying a standard Cash likelihood procedure, showing the projected constraints on g_aγ weaken by a factor of 10 (back to the current most sensitive constraints). However, we show how the use of a deep neural network can disentangle the energy-dependent features induced by instrumental miscalibration and those induced by photon-ALP mixing, allowing us to recover most of the sensitivity to the ALP physics. In our explicit demonstration, the machine learning applied allows us to exclude g_aγ > 2.0 × 10^–13 GeV^–1, complementing the projected constraints of next-generation ALP dark matter birefringent cavity searches for very-light ALPs. Finally, we show that a 200 ks AXIS/on-axis observation of NGC 1275 will tighten the current best constraints on very-light ALPs by a factor of 3.