2020/07/01 by Croon, Djuna, McDermott, Samuel D., Sakstein, Jeremy
#Astrophysics of Galaxies (astro-ph.GA) #Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics (astro-ph.CO) #FOS: Physical sciences #General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology (gr-qc) #High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena (astro-ph.HE) #High Energy Physics - Phenomenology (hep-ph)
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2007.00650
We pioneer the black hole mass gap as a powerful new tool for constraining new particles. A new particle that couples to the Standard Model---such as an axion---acts as an additional source of loss in the cores of population-III stars, suppressing mass lost due to winds and quenching the pair-instability. This results in heavier astrophysical black holes. As an example, using stellar simulations we show that the solar axion explanation of the recent XENON1T excess implies astrophysical black holes of ~ 56 MS, squarely within the black hole mass gap predicted by the Standard Model.