gammaALPs: An open-source python package for computing photon-axion-like-particle oscillations in astrophysical environments

Abstract

Axions and axion-like particles (ALPs) are hypothetical particles that occur in extensions of the Standard Model and are candidates for cold dark matter. They could be detected through their oscillations into photons in the presence of external electromagnetic fields. gammaALPs is an open-source python framework that computes the oscillation probability between photons and axions/ALPs. In addition to solving the photon-ALP equations of motion, gammaALPs includes models for magnetic fields in different astrophysical environments such as jets of active galactic nuclei, intra-cluster and intergalactic media, and the Milky Way. Users are also able to easily incorporate their own custom magnetic-field models. We review the basic functionality and features of gammaALPs, which is heavily based on other open-source scientific packages such as numpy and scipy. Although focused on gamma-ray energies, gammaALPs can be easily extended to arbitrary photon energies.