Axion Electrodyanmics in the Presence of Current Sources

Axions are among the most sought-after candidates for dark matter. In the ultralight regime, they could help alleviate puzzles in small scale cosmology. Searches for a halo of axion dark matter rely on the electromagnetic response to a magnetic field. In this work, we resolve a number of issues in the determination of this response by carefully solving Maxwell’s equations in the presence of an axion background. We find that the electric field induced by a magnetic field in an axion background is significant and unsuppressed by the size of the experiment.