Caputo Andrea, Janka Hans-Thomas, Raffelt Georg, Vitagliano Edoardo
School of Physics and Astronomy, Tel-Aviv University, Tel-Aviv 69978, Israel.
Department of Particle Physics and Astrophysics, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot 7610001, Israel.
Phys Rev Lett. 2022 Jun 3;128(22):221103. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.128.221103.
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→2γ 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 ^{56}Ni. 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_{aγγ} in the 10^{-10}-10^{-8} GeV^{-1} range.
在大质量恒星坍缩过程中形成的炽热致密核心，是诸如惰性中微子、暗光子、类轴子粒子（ALP）等假设的弱相互作用粒子的强大来源。如果平均自由程小于前身星半径，诸如a→2γ这样的辐射衰变会将能量沉积在周围物质中。我们首次使用爆炸能量特别低的超新星（SN）群体作为最灵敏的量热计来限制这种可能性。这些超新星在观测上被识别为具有低喷发速度和低质量喷发(^{56}Ni)的低光度事件。它们的低能量将粒子衰变的能量沉积限制在小于约0.1B，其中1B（贝塞耳）=(10^{51})尔格。对于质量为1 - 500MeV的ALP，这个一般性论点排除了(10^{-10}-10^{-8}) (GeV^{-1})范围内的ALP - 光子耦合(G_{aγγ})。
