Low-Energy Supernovae Severely Constrain Radiative Particle Decays.

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→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 0.1B, where 1 B(bethe)=10^{51} erg. For 1-500MeV-mass ALPs, this generic argument excludes ALP-photon couplings G_{aγγ} in the 10^{-10}-10^{-8} GeV^{-1} range.