Enhanced Stellar Production of Weakly Interacting Slim Particles from Non-Thermal Nuclear Cascades

Víctor Fonoll; Maurizio Giannotti; Giuseppe Lucente

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arXiv · 2605.23317

Enhanced Stellar Production of Weakly Interacting Slim Particles from Non-Thermal Nuclear Cascades

Víctor Fonoll·Maurizio Giannotti·Giuseppe Lucente

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Abstract

Weakly interacting slim particles (WISPs) can be produced in stars through the conversion of non-thermal photons generated in nuclear reactions. Previous studies have generally treated these sources only at the level of their primary injection lines. We show that this picture is incomplete: repeated Compton scatterings redistribute the injected photons into a broad low-energy spectrum, while associated positrons can thermalize and annihilate into a 511~keV line. Together, these effects define a generic non-thermal photon reservoir and thus a broadly applicable source term for any photon-coupled WISP. We develop a general framework for this mechanism and illustrate its impact with the example of dark-photon production in the solar pp chain. Our results show that non-thermal stellar WISP production can be substantially underestimated if Compton reprocessing and positron annihilation are neglected.

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Víctor Fonoll, Maurizio Giannotti, Giuseppe Lucente. 2026-05-22. Enhanced Stellar Production of Weakly Interacting Slim Particles from Non-Thermal Nuclear Cascades. https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.23317

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