Dark gauge boson emission from supernova pions

Abstract

The hot, neutron-rich, and dense circumstance in core-collapse supernovae provides a source of negatively charged pions that may make up a significant portion of the matter. These abundant thermal pions offer an opportunity to populate light and hidden hypothetical particles. In this study, we discuss the dark gauge boson production via reactions involving supernova pions. The rate of this production is determined by the isovector nucleon coupling. We consider two toy models, the dark photon and the gauged B-L models, that carry the typical distinct isovector nucleon coupling structure in the medium. Pion-induced dark gauge bosons leave an imprint on several observational consequences associated with supernova. Their sizable emissivity and characteristic hard spectral distribution result in the stringent constraints on the dark gauge boson models, in particular at masses above the two electron mass. © 2023 authors. Published by the American Physical Society. Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by SCOAP3.