Axions and the Cooling of White Dwarf Stars

By Jordi Isern, E. García–Berro, S. Torres, S. Catalan. 2008

166 citations recorded by the source corpus.

White dwarfs are the end product of the lives of intermediate- and low-mass stars and their evolution is described as a simple cooling process. Recently, it has been possible to determine with an unprecedented precision their luminosity function, that is, the number of stars per unit volume and luminosity interval. We show here that the shape of the bright branch of this function is only sensitive to the averaged cooling rate of white dwarfs and we propose to use this property to check the possible existence of axions, a proposed but not yet detected weakly interacting particle. Our results indicate that the inclusion of the emission of axions in the evolutionary models of white dwarfs noticeably improves the agreement between the theoretical calculations and the observational white dwarf luminosity function. The best fit is obtained for macos2β meV, where ma is the mass of the axion and cos2β is a free parameter. We also show that values larger than 10 meV are clearly excluded. The existing theoretical and observational uncertainties do not yet allow the confirmation of the existence of axions, but our results clearly show that if their mass is of the order of a few meV, the white dwarf luminosity function is sensitive enough to detect their existence.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/485e87830c0a8d28ec883a73128d4aa2ab9db5d4

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Citations in the corpus

Evolutionary and pulsational properties of white dwarf stars (2010, background): “2010), the physics of neutrino emission (Winget et al. 2004), the existence of axions (Isern et al. 2008) and the variation of fundamental constants (Garcı́a–Berro et al. 1995).”
NEW COOLING SEQUENCES FOR OLD WHITE DWARFS (2010, background): “Additionally, they can be used to place constraints on exotic elementary particles (Isern et al. 1992, 2008; Córsico et al. 2001) or on alternative theories of gravitation (Garcı́a–Berro et al. 1995; Benvenuto et al. 2004).”
The type IIB string axiverse and its low-energy phenomenology (2012, background): “However – and intriguingly – reanalysis of the same white dwarf with improvements in the accuracy and precision of the pulsational data identifies a non-standard energy loss [12, 63, 64].”
Cool WISPs for stellar cooling excesses (2015, unknown): “More precisely, in the environment typical of the WD interior the neutrino emission rate is roughly proportional to T 8 [56].”
Light shining through walls (2010, background): “Interestingly, a possible non-standard energy loss has been recently identified in the white dwarf (WD) luminosity function [41].”
Revisiting the axion bounds from the Galactic white dwarf luminosity function (2014, methodology): “[12, 22] find that the inclusion of the DFSZaxion emissivity, with ma cos2 β ∼ 5 meV, in the evolutionary models of white dwarfs would improve the agreement between the theoretical and observational WDLFs, and that axion masses ma cos2 β > 10 meV are clearly excluded.”
Towards a new generation axion helioscope (2011, background): “iants of globular clusters, namely gae <2.5 ×10−13 [73, 74]. Axion emission is also constrained by the cooling of white dwarfs (WDs) [75]. However, in this case the observed WD luminosity function [19, 20] seems to actually prefer some axion emission. Independent evidence for an extra cooling mec”