Revisiting the SN1987A gamma-ray limit on ultralight axion-like particles

By A. Payez, Carmelo Evoli, Tobias Fischer, Maurizio Giannotti, A. Mirizzi, A. Ringwald. 2014

383 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We revise the bound from the supernova SN1987A on the coupling of ultralight axion-like particles (ALPs) to photons. In a core-collapse supernova, ALPs would be emitted via the Primakoff process, and eventually convert into gamma rays in the magnetic field of the Milky Way. The lack of a gamma-ray signal in the GRS instrument of the SMM satellite in coincidence with the observation of the neutrinos emitted from SN1987A therefore provides a strong bound on their coupling to photons. Due to the large uncertainty associated with the current bound, we revise this argument, based on state-of-the-art physical inputs both for the supernova models and for the Milky-Way magnetic field. Furthermore, we provide major amendments, such as the consistent treatment of nucleon-degeneracy effects and of the reduction of the nuclear masses in the hot and dense nuclear medium of the supernova. With these improvements, we obtain a new upper limit on the photon-ALP coupling: gaγ ≲ 5.3 × 10-12 GeV-1, for ma ≲ 4.4 × 10-10 eV, and we also give its dependence at larger ALP masses ma. Moreover, we discuss how much the Fermi-LAT satellite experiment could improve this bound, should a close-enough supernova explode in the near future.

Subfields: Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e3b0ceccb723b6286573cee20f09265ef7601286

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Citations in the corpus

A new bound on axion-like particles (2017, background): “Hence, we note that our constraint changes by less than a factor of two under modifications of the underlying magnetic field model, and the upper bound on gaγ is in all cases stronger than that derived from SN1987A.”
New experimental approaches in the search for axion-like particles (2018, background): “The possible observation of a nearby supernova explosion by Fermi-LAT would allow to probe much smaller gaγ values [379, 381] down to the dashed red line indicated in Fig.”
Sensitivity projections for dark matter searches with the Fermi large area telescope (2016, methodology): “Together with the bounds from the non-observation of a Gamma-Ray Burst (GRB) from the SN 1987A [270] and the non-observations of irregularities with the H.”
The landscape of QCD axion models (2020, background): “Besides the experiments and bounds discussed in this section, we have added to the figure also the bound from the search for spectral irregularities in the gamma ray spectrum of NGC 1275 [451], from the non-observation of gamma rays from SN 1987A [452] and the Fermi Lat potential in the case of a fu”