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arXiv · 2007.00650

Missing in Axion: where are XENON1T's big black holes?

Djuna Croon·Samuel D. McDermott·Jeremy Sakstein
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Abstract

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.

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Djuna Croon, Samuel D. McDermott, Jeremy Sakstein. 2020-07-01. Missing in Axion: where are XENON1T's big black holes?. https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.00650

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