11-14 March 2025
IFT UAM/CSIC
Europe/Madrid timezone

Disentangling axion-like particle couplings to nucleons via a delayed signal in Super-Kamiokande from a future supernova

13 Mar 2025, 12:05
25m
IFT UAM/CSIC

IFT UAM/CSIC

Speaker

David Alonso-González (IFT (UAM-CSIC))

Description

In this talk we show that, if axion-like particles (ALPs) from core-collapse supernovae (SNe) couple to protons, they would produce very characteristic signatures in neutrino water Cherenkov detectors through their scattering off free protons via $a \, p \rightarrow p \, \gamma$ interactions. Specifically, sub-MeV ALPs would generate photons with energies $\sim 30$ MeV, which could be observed by Super-Kamiokande and Hyper-Kamiokande as a delayed signal after a future detection of SN neutrinos. We apply this to a hypothetical neighbouring SN (at a maximum distance of 100~kpc) and demonstrate that the region in the parameter space with ALP masses between $10^{-4}$~MeV and $1$~MeV and ALP-proton couplings in the range $3 \times 10^{-6}-4 \times 10^{-5}$ could be probed. We argue that this new signature, combined with the one expected at $\sim 7$~MeV from oxygen de-excitation, would allow us to disentangle ALP-neutron and ALP-proton couplings.

Primary author

David Alonso-González (IFT (UAM-CSIC))

Presentation Materials

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