2025/01/21 by Yonglin Li, Li, Yonglin, Zuowei Liu +1 · 4 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Astrophysics and Cosmic Phenomena #Neutrino Physics Research #Dark Matter and Cosmic Phenomena
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2501.12075
Supernovae offer a unique hot and dense environment to probe new physics beyond the Standard Model. We investigate supernova cooling constraints on lepton-flavor-violating (LFV) axions and axion-like particles (ALPs) that couple to electrons and muons. For LFV-ALP production in supernovae, muon decay and lepton bremsstrahlung have been considered previously. In this work, we identify the electron-muon coalescence channel as an efficient new production mechanism in the high-mass regime. We also include the semi-Compton scattering process, which has recently been shown to provide sizable contributions for electron-coupled ALPs. We find that muon decay dominates in the low-mass regime, electron-muon coalescence becomes the leading channel at high masses, and semi-Compton scattering provides the dominant contribution in the intermediate mass range. We find that the electron-muon coalescence process yields the strongest constraints in the mass range of ∼ (115,280) MeV, probing the ALP-electron-muon coupling down to ∼ 4× 10-10 for an ALP mass of ∼200 MeV.