Related papers: Blue Loops, Cepheids, and Forays into Axions
Superradiant instability of rotating black holes (BHs) leads to the formation of a cloud of ultralight bosons, such as axions. When the BH with the cloud belongs to a binary system and is in an inspiraling orbit, the resonant transition…
Axions and axion-like particles (ALPs) have gained immense attention in searches for beyond Standard Model (BSM) physics. Experiments searching for axions leverage their predicted couplings to Standard Model (SM) particles to look for…
The prospect of identifying axion signals due to axion-photon coupling induced changes to the polarization has now become a reality in view of near-horizon polarimetric observations by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT). Axion-like particles…
Masses of classical Cepheids of 3 to 11 M$\odot$ are predicted by theory but those measured, clump between 3.6 and 5 M$\odot$. As a result, their mass-luminosity relation is poorly constrained, impeding our understanding of basic stellar…
Cepheid masses derived from pulsations or binary dynamics are generally lower than those derived from stellar evolution models. Recent efforts have been dedicated to investigating the effects of abundances, mass loss, rotation, convection…
We present the results of a theoretical investigation aimed at testing whether full amplitude, nonlinear, convective models account for the I-band light curves of Bump Cepheids in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). We selected two objects…
We present a new Bayesian approach to constrain the intrinsic parameters (stellar mass, age) of the eclipsing binary system CEP0227 in the LMC. We computed evolutionary models covering a broad range in chemical compositions and in stellar…
The treatment of convective boundaries during core helium burning is a fundamental problem in stellar evolution calculations. In Paper~I we showed that new asteroseismic observations of these stars imply they have either very large…
We perform a detailed analysis of Cepheids in NGC 4258, Magellanic Clouds and Milky Way in order to verify the reliability of the theoretical scenario based on a large set of nonlinear convective pulsation models. We derive Wesenheit…
Axion-like particles (ALPs) can be produced by thermal processes in a stellar interior, escape from the star and, if sufficiently light, be converted into photons in the external Galactic magnetic field. Such a process could produce a…
Axions and axion-like particles (ALPs) remain highly motivated extensions to the standard model due to their ability to address open questions such as the relic abundance of dark matter and the strong CP problem. Axions are also capable of…
Updated evolutionary and pulsational model predictions are combined in order to interpret the properties of Galactic Classical Cepheids in the Gaia Data Release 2. In particular, the location of the instability strip boundaries and the…
Context. Stars with masses ranging from 3 to 11 M_\odot exhibit multiple evolutionary paths. Less massive stars in this range conclude their evolution as carbon-oxygen (CO) white dwarfs. However, those that achieve carbon ignition before…
The discovery of an axion-like particle above the QCD line would rule out Grand Unified Theories, including the perturbative heterotic string with the Standard Model embedded in a single $E_8$ factor or $SO(32)$. In this work we study a…
The overcritical regime of axion-electrodynamics (AED) is investigated. For magnetic fields larger than the characteristic scale linked to AED, quantum vacuum fluctuations due to axion-like fields can dominate over those associated with the…
We examine the convective core helium burning phase of intermediate mass stars, and investigate the role of coupling of nuclear burning and mixing on the extension and duration of the blue loop phase. We compare the theoretical scenario…
Mixing in the convective core is quite uncertain in core helium burning stars. In order to explore the overshooting mixing beyond the convective core, we incorporated the $k$-$\omega$ proposed by Li (2012, 2017) into MESA, and investigated…
Prior to core collapse, the neutrino emission from red supergiants (RSGs) is so large that a nearby ($\lesssim1$kpc) RSG will become visible in current and near-future neutrino detectors. The rate of emission and the spectra of the…
The recent detection of the cosmic microwave background polarimeter experiment BICEP2 of tensor fluctuations in the B-mode power spectrum basically excludes all plausible axion models where its decay constant is above $10^{13}$ GeV.…
Studies of axion-like particles (ALPs) commonly focus on a single type of interaction, for example couplings only to photons. Most ALP models however predict correlations between different couplings, which change the phenomenology in…