Axion and neutrino bounds improved with new calibrations of the tip of the red-giant branch using geometric distance determinations

By Francesco Capozzi, G. Raffelt. Physical Review D, 2020

151 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The brightness of the tip of the red-giant branch (TRGB) allows one to constrain novel energy losses that would lead to a larger core mass at helium ignition and thus to a brighter TRGB than expected by standard stellar models. The required absolute TRGB calibrations strongly improve with reliable geometric distances that have become available for the galaxy NGC 4258 that hosts a water megamaser and to the Large Magellanic Cloud based on 20 detached eclipsing binaries. Moreover, we revise a previous TRGB calibration in the globular cluster $\omega$ Centauri with a recent kinematical distance determination based on Gaia DR2 data. All of these calibrations have similar uncertainties and they agree with each other and with recent dedicated stellar models. Using NGC 4258 as the cleanest extra-galactic case, we thus find an updated constraint on the axion-electron coupling of $g_{ae}<1.6\times10^{-13}$ and $\mu_\nu<1.5\times10^{-12}\mu_{\rm B}$ (95\% CL) on a possible neutrino dipole moment, whereas $\omega$ Centauri as the best galactic target provides instead $g_{ae}<1.3\times10^{-13}$ and $\mu_\nu<1.2\times10^{-12}\mu_{\rm B}$. The reduced observational errors imply that stellar evolution theory and bolometric corrections begin to dominate the overall uncertainties.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c0861716dbf81ddb138afd8b0936c705dc6e27b1

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. Jenny E. Greene
2. Chung-Pei Ma
3. J. Blakeslee
4. R. Volkas
5. Ofer Lahav
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Citations in the corpus

• A buyer’s guide to the Hubble constant (2021, result): “Other results (Soltis et al. 2021; Reid et al. 2019; Capozzi and Raffelt 2020; Cerny et al. 2021 – see for example Table 3 in Blakeslee et al. 2021) cluster evenly around these two values.”
• Advancing globular cluster constraints on the axion-photon coupling (2022, background): “those from the red giant branch tip luminosity [53, 54], as this interaction is not present in KSVZ-type models.”
• The Hubble Constant from Infrared Surface Brightness Fluctuation Distances (2021, methodology): “A3ITRGB This is very close to the value derived by Jang & Lee (2017) and the reassessment by Capozzi & Raffelt (2020) combining the distance from Reid et al. (2019) with the photometric measurements of Jang & Lee (2017).”
• More axions from strings (2020, background): “For those from white dwarfs and red giants we plot the limit from [75] for tanβ = 1.”