Speaker
Description
I will describe and explore the consequences of a newly identified physical phenomenon: volumetric stellar emission into gravitationally bound orbits of weakly coupled particles such as axions, moduli, hidden photons, and fermions. While only a tiny fraction of the instantaneous luminosity of a star (the vast majority of the emission is into relativistic modes), the continual injection of these particles into a small part of phase space causes them to accumulate over astrophysically long time scales, forming what I call a "stellar basin", in analogy with the geologic kind. The energy density of the Solar basin can surpass that of the relativistic Solar flux at Earth's location after only a million years, for a sufficiently long-lived particle produced through an emission process whose matrix elements are unsuppressed at low momentum. This observation has immediate and striking consequences for direct detection experiments---including new limits on axion and hidden-photon parameter space independent of dark matter assumptions. I will also discuss ongoing N-body simulations of the Solar basin, and the prospects for indirect detection of basin particles around stars.
Meeting ID: 986 0080 9266
Password: HEP_joint
Time: Nov 25, 2020 04:00 PM Jerusalem
Join from PC, Mac, Linux, iOS or Android: https://weizmann.zoom.us/j/98600809266?pwd=NW9DZk5meGNTYSthZ3NFNU9RR0liQT09
