The Sun as a probe of Fundamental Physics and Cosmology

I P Lopes

doi:10.1088/1742-6596/665/1/012079

Abstract

The high quality data provided by helioseismology, solar neutrino flux measurements, spectral determination of solar abundances, nuclear reactions rates coefficients among other experimental data, leads to the highly accurate prediction of the internal structure of the present Sun - the standard solar model. In this talk, I have discussed how the standard solar model, the best representation of the real Sun, can be used to study the properties of dark matter, for which two complementary approaches have been developed: - to limit the number of theoretical candidates proposed as the dark matter particles, this analysis complements the experimental search of dark matter, and - as a template for the study of the impact of dark matter in the evolution of stars, which possibly occurs for stellar populations formed in regions of high density of dark matter, such as stars formed in the centre of galaxies and the first generations of stars.

Highlights

In this talk, I discussed how the Sun is being used as a probe of fundamental physics and modern cosmology
As a nuclear physics community, if you remember the 30’s and 40’s, the Sun has played a key role in the progress and development of nuclear physics, namely, by contributing to the understanding of the basic nuclear processes that lead to the discovery of the nuclear chain reactions (PP chains, CNO cycle and 3α reactions) by H
It is no surprise, that in particular the Sun, and in general the other stars, can play an important role to explore the validity of new fundamental laws of physics, such as testing new theories of gravity proposed as alternative to General Gravity [1], to discuss the precision of new measurements of fundamental constants [2], to study the properties of neutrino flavour oscillations [3, 4], and, as discussed in this talk, as a tool to determine the properties of dark matter (DM)) [5,6,7]

Summary

Introduction

I discussed how the Sun is being used as a probe of fundamental physics and modern cosmology. Our understanding of the properties of the solar and stellar plasmas still requires some improvements [17], it is clear that the Sun and sun-like stars can be used as tools to put constraints in fundamental physics, like dark matter particles properties [19,20,21,22,23,24,25, 31, 32], as presently is done for other stars, such as neutron stars [26,27,28,29,30].

Results

Conclusion