Speaker: Andrea Caputo
Low-Energy Supernovae Severely Constrain Radiative Particle Decays
The hot and dense core formed in the collapse of a massive star is a powerful source of hypothetical feebly-interacting particles such as sterile neutrinos, dark photons, axion-like particles (ALPs), and others. Radiative decays such as a→2γ deposit this energy in the surrounding material if the mean free path is less than the radius of the progenitor star. For the first time, we use a supernova (SN) population with particularly low explosion energies as the most sensitive calorimeters to constrain this possibility. These SNe are observationally identified as low-luminosity events with low ejecta velocities and low masses of ejected 56Ni. Their low energies limit the energy deposition from particle decays to less than about 0.1 B, where 1 B (bethe)=1051 erg. For 1-500 MeV-mass ALPs, this generic argument excludes ALP-photon couplings Gaγγ in the 10−10-10−8 GeV−1 range.