The hot and dense core formed in the collapse of a massive star is a powerful source of hypothetical feebly interacting particles such as sterile neutrinos, dark photons, axionlike particles (ALPs), and others. Radiative decays such as a -> 2 gamma deposit this energy in the surrounding material if the mean free path is less than the radius of the progenitor star. For the first time, we use a supernova (SN) population with particularly low explosion energies as the most sensitive calorimeters to constrain this possibility. These SNe are observationally identified as low-luminosity events with low ejecta velocities and low masses of ejected Ni-56. Their low energies limit the energy deposition from particle decays to less than about 0.1 B, where 1 B(bethe) = 10(51) erg. For 1-500 MeV-mass ALPs, this generic argument excludes ALP-photon couplings G(a gamma gamma) in the 10(-)(10) - 10(-8) GeV-1 range.
Low-Energy Supernovae Severely Constrain Radiative Particle Decays / Caputo, Andrea; Janka, Hans-Thomas; Raffelt, Georg; Vitagliano, Edoardo. - In: PHYSICAL REVIEW LETTERS. - ISSN 0031-9007. - 128:22(2022). [10.1103/physrevlett.128.221103]
Low-Energy Supernovae Severely Constrain Radiative Particle Decays
Caputo, Andrea;
2022
Abstract
The hot and dense core formed in the collapse of a massive star is a powerful source of hypothetical feebly interacting particles such as sterile neutrinos, dark photons, axionlike particles (ALPs), and others. Radiative decays such as a -> 2 gamma deposit this energy in the surrounding material if the mean free path is less than the radius of the progenitor star. For the first time, we use a supernova (SN) population with particularly low explosion energies as the most sensitive calorimeters to constrain this possibility. These SNe are observationally identified as low-luminosity events with low ejecta velocities and low masses of ejected Ni-56. Their low energies limit the energy deposition from particle decays to less than about 0.1 B, where 1 B(bethe) = 10(51) erg. For 1-500 MeV-mass ALPs, this generic argument excludes ALP-photon couplings G(a gamma gamma) in the 10(-)(10) - 10(-8) GeV-1 range.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
