Stellar cooling bounds on new light particles: plasma mixing effects

By Edward Hardy, Robert Lasenby. Journal of High Energy Physics, 2016

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Strong constraints on the coupling of new light particles to the Standard Model (SM) arise from their production in the hot cores of stars, and the effects of this on stellar cooling. For new light particles which have an effective in-medium mixing with the photon, plasma effects can result in parametrically different production rates to those obtained from a naive calculation. Taking these previously-neglected contributions into account, we make updated estimates for the stellar cooling bounds on light scalars and vectors with a variety of SM couplings. In particular, we improve the bounds on light (m ≲ keV) scalars coupling to electrons or nucleons by up to 3 orders of magnitude in the coupling squared, significantly revise the supernova cooling bounds on dark photon couplings, and qualitatively change the mass dependence of stellar bounds on new vectors. Scalars with mass ≲ 2 keV that couple through the Higgs portal are constrained to mixing angle sin θ ≲ 3 × 10−10, which gives the dominant bound for scalar masses above ∼ 0.2eV.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1aa7848bf3c7e4545a8fa0844fdcb6e80d56950d

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Citations in the corpus

Light dark matter: Models and constraints (2017, background): “We show limits from fifth force [64] and neutron scattering searches [65] (orange), rare meson decays (green), and stellar cooling limits from HB stars [66] (red), RG stars [66] (purple) and SN1987A (blue).”
The landscape of QCD axion models (2020, background): “10 erg s−1g−1, gives the rather restrictive bound [404]”
Dark Matter's secret liaisons: phenomenology of a dark U(1) sector with bound states (2016, background): “Since the latter bounds do not include potentially important effects [94, 95] we do not shade the related area, in order to be conservative.”
Recent Progress in the Physics of Axions and Axion-Like Particles (2020, background): “For axions lighter than MeV scale, the constraints are from the axion-mediated 5th force induced by ḡaN , stellar cooling by ḡae [62], and supernova (SN1987A) cooling by ḡaN .”
New experimental approaches in the search for axion-like particles (2018, background): “7× 10−15 Luminosity of the RGB tip [164] ḡaN < 1.”
Dark matter models and direct detection (2019, background): “[119] where identical results are obtained in the two bases.”
Cosmology with a very light Lμ − Lτ gauge boson (2019, background): “[43, 44] can straightforwardly be adapted to constrain the Lμ − Lτ model.”
Search for New Physics with Atoms and Molecules (2017, background): “Although the astrophysical constraints on |gpgs| /~c are more stringent than the laboratory limits in all cases, there is both a degree of model specificity (Massó and Redondo, 2005) and some degree of uncertainty regarding the accuracy of stellar models (Hardy and Lasenby, 2017).”