Related papers: Stellar cooling anomalies and variant axion models
The observed rapid cooling of the neutron star (NS) located at the center of the supernova remnant Cassiopeia A (Cas A) can be explained in the minimal NS cooling scenario. This consequence may be changed if there exists an extra cooling…
Axions are hypothetical pseudoscalar particles introduced initially as a solution to the Strong CP problem in Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD), and they also arise naturally in a broad class of low-energy compactifications of string theory.…
A general overview of the main physical processes driving the cooling of an isolated neutron star is presented. Among the most important ones are the various possible neutrino emission processes and the occurrence of baryon pairing. Special…
Axions, if realized in nature, can be copiously produced in the early universe via thermal processes, contributing to the mass-energy density of thermal hot relics. In light of the most recent cosmological observations, we analyze two…
The evolution of white dwarfs is a simple gravothermal process of cooling. Since the shape of their luminosity function is sensitive to the characteristic cooling time, it is possible to use its slope to test the existence of additional…
We study cosmological solutions of (pseudo)scalar theories with periodic potentials, in the presence of arbitrary cosmological fluids -- including a cosmological constant of either sign. Independently of the initial misalignment angle and…
If axions or other low-mass pseudoscalars couple to electrons (``fine structure constant'' $\alpha_a$) they are emitted from red giant stars by the Compton process $\gamma+e\to e+a$ and by bremsstrahlung $e+(Z,A)\to (Z,A)+e+a$. We construct…
Recently we have proposed a simple hadronic axion model within gauge-mediated supersymmetry breaking. In this paper we discuss various cosmological consequences of the model in great detail. A particular attention is paid to a saxion, a…
In conventional models of galactic and cluster cooling flows widespread cooling (mass dropout) is assumed to avoid accumulation of unacceptably large central masses. However, recent XMM observations have failed to find spectral evidence for…
The low-energy electronic recoil spectrum in XENON1T provides an intriguing hint for potential new physics. At the same time, observations of horizontal branch stars favor the existence of a small amount of extra cooling compared to the one…
New particles coupled to the Standard Model can equilibrate in stellar cores if they are sufficiently heavy and strongly coupled. In this work, we investigate the astrophysical consequences of such a scenario for massive stars by…
We show that the cosmological abundance of string axions is much smaller than naive estimates if the Hubble scale of inflation, $H_{\rm inf}$, is sufficiently low (but can still be much higher than the axion masses) and if the inflation…
The cooling of compact isolated objects for different values of the gravitational mass has been simulated for two alternative assumptions. One is that the interior of the star is purely hadronic and second that the star can have a rather…
We study the parameter space of cold dark matter axions in two cosmological scenarios with non-standard thermal histories before Big Bang nucleosynthesis: the Low Temperature Reheating (LTR) cosmology and the kination cosmology. If the…
The axion, a well-motivated hypothetical particle arising in extensions of the Standard Model, can be produced copiously within the hot, compact cores of white dwarf stars. The shape of the white dwarf luminosity function (WDLF) is a…
Ultralight bosons such as axions and dark photons are well-motivated hypothetical particles, whose couplings to ordinary matter can be effectively constrained by stellar cooling. Limits on these interactions can be obtained by demanding…
We review a class of models which generalize the traditional Peccei-Quinn (PQ) axion solution by a St\"uckelberg pseudoscalar. Such axion models represent a significant variant with respect to earlier scenarios where axion fields were…
We have recently proposed a mechanism of photon-axion oscillations as a way of rendering supernovae dimmer without cosmic acceleration. Subsequently, it has been argued that the intergalactic plasma may interfere adversely with this…
Recent XMM-Newton observations of clusters of galaxies have indicated the soft X-ray spectra to be inconsistent with the simple isobaric cooling flow model. There is almost no feature of the cold gas expected from the model. This shows that…
The QCD axion needs not be an exact pseudoscalar for solving the strong CP problem. Its imperfectness can play a profound role cosmologically. We propose effective operators, where the Peccei-Quinn field linearly couples to Standard Model…