Abstract
The high temperature and electron degeneracy attained during a supernova allow for the formation of a large muon abundance within the core of the resulting protoneutron star. If new pseudoscalar degrees of freedom have large couplings to the muon, they can be produced by this muon abundance and contribute to the cooling of the star. By generating the largest collection of supernova simulations with muons to date, we show that observations of the cooling rate of SN 1987A place strong constraints on the coupling of axionlike particles to muons, limiting the coupling to g_{aμ}<10^{-8.1} GeV^{-1}.
Highlights
Introduction.—Axions are hypothetical light pseudoscalar degrees of freedom
A large research effort is dedicated to searching for these “axionlike particles”, mainly through their coupling to photons [7,10,11,12,13], electrons [14], or nucleons [15]
Astrophysics provides us with an alternate means to probe this coupling: the cooling of supernovae
Summary
1.241 1.406 1.712 1.707 improve on the previous estimate by running dedicated simulations that make use of recent results [36,37,38,39,40,41,42,43,44] constraining the PNS equation of state and mass, allowing us to reduce the uncertainty and set a robust bound on the coupling over 6 orders of magnitude. These new constraints on the equation of state (EOS) and mass lead to a generically higher core temperature, which suggests that existing bounds on other axion couplings may be strengthened by including this microphysics as well. Note that these equations of state are considerably softer than those of previous works on axion emission from supernovae [53,54,55], which employed stiff equations of state that are increasingly
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