Revisiting the axion bounds from the Galactic white dwarf luminosity function

By M. M. Bertolami, B. Melendez, L. Althaus, Jordi Isern. 2014

193 citations recorded by the source corpus.

It has been shown that the shape of the luminosity function of white dwarfs (WDLF) is a powerful tool to check for the possible existence of DFSZ-axions, a proposed but not yet detected type of weakly interacting particles. With the aim of deriving new constraints on the axion mass, we compute in this paper new theoretical WDLFs on the basis of WD evolving models that incorporate the feedback of axions on the thermal structure of the white dwarf. We find that the impact of the axion emission into the neutrino emission can not be neglected at high luminosities M Bol≲ 8) and that the axion emission needs to be incorporated self-consistently into the evolution of the white dwarfs when dealing with axion masses larger than ma cos 2β≳ 5 meV (i.e. axion-electron coupling constant gae≳ 1.4× 10-13). We went beyond previous works by including 5 different derivations of the WDLF in our analysis. Then we have performed χ2-tests to have a quantitative measure of the agreement between the theoretical WDLFs — computed under the assumptions of different axion masses and normalization methods --- and the observed WDLFs of the Galactic disk. While all the WDLF studied in this work disfavour axion masses in the range suggested by asteroseismology ma cos 2β≳ 10 meV; gae≳ 2.8× 10-13) lower axion masses can not be discarded from our current knowledge of the WDLF of the Galactic Disk. A larger set of completely independent derivations of the WDLF of the galactic disk as well as a detailed study of the uncertainties of the theoretical WDLFs is needed before quantitative constraints on the axion-electron coupling constant can be made.

Subfields: Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5e4461bf16f3b29536b3eaaa6cf68780969c020e

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Citations in the corpus

Stellar recipes for axion hunters (2017, methodology): “As in [26], we find a small positive correlation between the normalisation factor and gae.”
New experimental approaches in the search for axion-like particles (2018, background): “The most stringent constraints come from different white-dwarf cooling arguments: period decreases of WD variables [326–330] and fits to the luminosity function [331, 332].”
The landscape of QCD axion models (2020, methodology): “The highest level of discrepancy is observed in G117 - B15A but that may be due to some assumptions about the trapping mode and should perhaps be reconsidered [384].”
Cool WISPs for stellar cooling excesses (2015, methodology): “In the case of the WDLF analysis, the 1σ interval is extracted from the inset in figure 6 in [8].”
The Dark Photon (2020, background): “(41) The most stringent limit for electrons comes from cooling in white dwarves (Miller Bertolami et al., 2014) and giant red stars (Viaux et al., 2013) by axion Bremsstrahlung in a degenerate medium.”
Early seeds of axion miniclusters (2018, background): “Axion models with values of fA 108 GeV are ruled out because many stellar systems would cool faster than observed by the emission of axions (see [6] and the recent revisions [7–10]).”
Pulsating white dwarfs: new insights (2019, unknown): “This constraint is a bit less restrictive than the upper bound derived from the Galactic WDLF, of µν ∼< 5 × 10 −12µB (Miller Bertolami, 2014), the upper bound for µν derived from the analysis of red giants from the colormagnitude diagram of the Galactic globular cluster M5, µν ∼< 4.5 × 10 −12µB…”