Abstract
The XENON1T collaboration has observed an excess in electronic recoil events below 5keV over the known background, which could originate from beyond-the-standard-model physics. The solar axion is a well-motivated model that has been proposed to explain the excess, though it has tension with astrophysical observations. The axions traveling from the Sun can be absorbed by the electrons in the xenon atoms via the axion-electron coupling. Meanwhile, they can also scatter with the atoms through the inverse Primakoff process via the axion-photon coupling, which emits a photon and mimics the electronic recoil signals. We found that the latter process cannot be neglected. After including the keV photon produced via the inverse Primakoff process in the detection, the tension with the astrophysical constraints can be significantly reduced. We also explore scenarios involving additional new physics to further alleviate the tension with the astrophysical bounds.
Highlights
The XENON1T collaboration has observed an excess in electronic recoil events below 5 keV over the known background, which could originate from beyond-the-standard-model physics
We explore scenarios involving additional new physics to further alleviate the tension with the astrophysical bounds
It was not included in the liquid time projection chamber type of experiments previously. After including both the electronic recoil and the inverse Primakoff process, the tension between the solar axion explanation and the astrophysical constraints is significantly reduced
Summary
In this Letter, we take into account the fact that, at the keV energy range, the current XENON1T experiment can hardly distinguish the detector response of photons from that of electronic recoils. Using the inverse Primakoff process to detect axions was proposed in the cryogenic experiments via Bragg scattering [44,45,46] and was applied by the SOLAX, COSME, CUORE, CDMS, and EDELWEISS collaborations [47,48,49,50,51,52]. Given the solar axion flux Φa, the differential event rate after including both axioelectric and inverse Primakoff processes in the detection is given by dR dEr
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