Stellar cooling bounds on new light particles: plasma mixing effects

Abstract

Strong constraints on the coupling of new light particles to the Standard Model (SM) arise from their production in the hot cores of stars, and the effects of this on stellar cooling. For new light particles which have an effective in-medium mixing with the photon, plasma effects can result in parametrically different production rates to those obtained from a naive calculation. Taking these previously-neglected contributions into account, we make updated estimates for the stellar cooling bounds on light scalars and vectors with a variety of SM couplings. In particular, we improve the bounds on light (m <~ keV) scalars coupling to electrons or nucleons by up to 3 orders of magnitude in the coupling squared, significantly revise the supernova cooling bounds on dark photon couplings, and qualitatively change the mass dependence of stellar bounds on new vectors. Scalars with mass <~ 2 keV that couple through the Higgs portal are constrained to mixing angle <~ 3*10^-10, which gives the dominant bound for scalar masses above ~ 0.2 eV.

36 pages, 7 figures; explanations clarified, results unchanged; matches version published in JHEP

References in corpus (7)

• Modules for Experiments in Stellar Astrophysics (MESA)
• Tests of the Gravitational Inverse-Square Law below the Dark-Energy Length Scale
• Revisiting the bound on axion-photon coupling from Globular Clusters
• Novel constraints on light elementary particles and extra-dimensional physics from the Casimir effect
• Unbroken B-L Symmetry
• Helioscope Bounds on Hidden Sector Photons
• Search for invisible decays of sub-GeV dark photons in missing-energy events at the CERN SPS

Cited by in corpus (25)

• The Dawn of FIMP Dark Matter: A Review of Models and Constraints
• Light Dark Matter: Models and Constraints
• Cosmology With a Very Light $L_{\mu }-L_{\tau }$ Gauge Boson
• Making dark matter out of light: freeze-in from plasma effects
• Improved isotope-shift-based bounds on bosons beyond the Standard Model through measurements of the ${}^2$D${}_{3/2}{-}^2$D${}_{5/2}$ interval in Ca${}^{+}$
• Probing new spin-independent interactions through precision spectroscopy in atoms with few electrons
• Self-interacting inelastic dark matter: A viable solution to the small scale structure problems
• Cosmological beam dump: constraints on dark scalars mixed with the Higgs boson
• Scalar Direct Detection: In-Medium Effects
• Revisiting longitudinal plasmon-axion conversion in external magnetic fields
• Probing dark photons with plasma haloscopes
• Dark Matter Absorption via Electronic Excitations
• Lepton Flavor Violation with Displaced Vertices
• Axion helioscopes as solar magnetometers
• Solar neutrino flux at keV energies
• 511 keV line constraints on feebly interacting particles from supernovae
• Updated Constraints on Self-Interacting Dark Matter from Supernova 1987A
• Supernova constraints on an axion-photon-dark photon interaction
• Nonlinearities of King's plot and their dependence on nuclear radii
• Medium effects in supernovae constraints on light mediators
• Supernovae and Weinberg's Higgs Portal Dark Radiation and Dark Matter
• Solar Active-Sterile Neutrino Conversion with Atomic Effects at Dark Matter Direct Detection Experiments
• Rate of dark photon emission from electron positron annihilation in massive stars
• LHC Lifetime Frontier and Visible Decay Searches in Composite Asymmetric Dark Matter Models
• Dark matter scattering in astrophysical media: collective effects