In this paper, we study the influence of the axion-plasmon, as proposed in [Phys. Rev. Lett. 120, 181803 (2018)] on the optical properties of the Schwarzschild black hole. Our aim is to provide a test to detect the effects of a fixed axion background using black holes. To accomplish our goal, we explore the effect of the axion-plasmon coupling on the motion of photons around the Schwarzschild black hole and check the possibility of observing those effects upon the black hole shadow, the gravitational deflection angle, Einstein rings and shadow images obtained by radially infalling gas on a black hole within a plasma medium. We find that these quantities are indeed affected by the axion-plasmon coupling parameters which consequently generalize some of the well-known results in the literature. It is shown that the size of the black hole shadow decreases with increasing axion-plasmon if observed from a sufficiently large distance.

• Received 30 July 2021
• Accepted 24 August 2021
• Corrected 29 September 2021

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.104.064053