Constraining axion-like particles using the white dwarf initial-final mass relation

Abstract

Axion-like particles (ALPs), a class of pseudoscalars common to many extensions of the Standard Model, have the capacity to drain energy from the interiors of stars. Consequently, stellar evolution can be used to derive many constraints on ALPs. We study the influence that keV-MeV scale ALPs which interact exclusively with photons can exert on the helium-burning shells of asymptotic giant branch stars, the latelife evolutionary phase of stars with initial masses less than 8M . We establish the sensitivity of the final stellar mass to such energy-loss for ALPs with masses currently permitted by stellar evolution bounds. A semiempirical constraint on the white dwarf initial-final mass relation (IFMR) derived from observation of double white dwarf binaries is then used to exclude part of a currently unconstrained region of ALP parameter space, the cosmological triangle. The derived constraint relaxes when the ALP decay length becomes shorter than the width of the helium-burning shell. Other potential sources for stellar constraints on ALPs are also discussed.

Heavy axion-like particles and MeV decay photons from nearby type Ia supernovae

“…where gaγ is the coupling constant, a is the ALP field, Fµν is the electromagnetic tensor, and Fµν is its dual. The mass ma and the coupling gaγ of heavy ALPs with ma > ∼ 10 keV have been explored by beam dump experiments (Jaeckel & Spannowsky 2016;Dolan et al 2017;Döbrich, Jaeckel, & Spadaro 2019;Banerjee et al 2020) and astronomical objects including globular clusters (Carenza et al 2020), white dwarfs (Dolan, Hiskens, & Volkas 2021), and the neutrino signal (Lee 2018;Lucente et al 2020) and γrays (Giannotti, Duffy, & Nita 2011;Jaeckel, Malta, & Redondo 2018) from SN 1987A. Also, implications of heavy ALPs on cosmological phenomena including Big Bang nucleosynthesis and the cosmic microwave background have been discussed (Cadamuro et al 2011;Depta, Hufnagel, & Schmidt-Hoberg 2020).…”