Speaker
Description
It has been demonstrated that axions can generically copiously produced from fluctuations in the background electromagnetic fields of pulsars. For axions with masses in the range $10^{-9} \text{eV} \lesssim m_a \lesssim 10^{-4} \text{eV}$, a large fraction of axions sourced from this process will remain gravitationally confined near the surface of the star, accumulating on long timescales, forming dense axion clouds.
Here, I will discuss how the presence of a dense axion could can back-react on the electrodynamic processes responsible for the generation of observed radiation from neutron stars. I will present preliminary results from numerical simulations aimed at identifying new observational signatures in the electromagnetic spectrum of pulsars that can be used to constrain the axion parameter space.
