First indirect detection constraints on axions in the Solar basin

Abstract

Axions with masses of order keV can be produced in great abundance within the Solar core. The majority of Sun-produced axions escape to infinity, but a small fraction of the flux is produced with speeds below the escape velocity. Over time, this process populates a basin of slow-moving axions trapped on bound orbits. These axions can decay to two photons, yielding an observable signature. We place the first limits on this solar basin of axions using recent quiescent solar observations made by the NuSTAR X-ray telescope. We compare three different methodologies for setting constraints, and obtain world-leading limits for axions with masses between 5 and 30 keV, in some cases improving on stellar cooling bounds by more than an order of magnitude in coupling.

15 pages, 15 figures

References in corpus (14)

• Revisiting the bound on axion-photon coupling from Globular Clusters
• A new Generation of Standard Solar Models
• Stellar cooling bounds on new light particles: plasma mixing effects
• NuSTAR Observations of the Bullet Cluster: Constraints on Inverse Compton Emission
• Stellar Recipes for Axion Hunters
• Revisiting the axion bounds from the Galactic white dwarf luminosity function
• NuSTAR hard X-ray observation of a sub-A class solar flare
• NuSTAR observations of a repeatedly microflaring active region
• The Maximum Patch Method for Directional Dark Matter Detection
• NuSTAR Observation of Energy Release in Eleven Solar Microflares
• A Helioscope for Gravitationally Bound Millicharged Particles
• Solar axions in large extra dimensions
• First NuSTAR Limits on Quiet Sun Hard X-Ray Transient Events
• Dark matter scattering in astrophysical media: collective effects

Cited by in corpus (6)

• The Irreducible Axion Background
• Axion Couplings in Grand Unified Theories
• Superradiant axion clouds around asteroid-mass primordial black holes
• Searching for Ultralight Dark Matter Conversion in Solar Corona using Low Frequency Array Data
• Detecting Axion-Like Particles with Primordial Black Holes
• Probing high-energy solar axion flux with a large scintillation neutrino detector