Light Curves and Event Rates of Axion Instability Supernovae

Kavli Affiliate: Shunsaku Horiuchi

| First 5 Authors: Kanji Mori, Takashi J. Moriya, Tomoya Takiwaki, Kei Kotake, Shunsaku Horiuchi

| Summary:

It was recently proposed that exotic particles can trigger a new stellar
instability which is analogous to the e-e+ pair instability if they are
produced and reach equilibrium in the stellar plasma. In this study, we
construct axion instability supernova (AISN) models caused by the new
instability to predict their observational signatures. We focus on heavy
axion-like particles (ALPs) with masses of ~400 keV–2 MeV and coupling with
photons of g_{ag}~10^{-5} GeV^{-1}. It is found that the 56Ni mass and the
explosion energy are significantly increased by ALPs for a fixed stellar mass.
As a result, the peak times of the light curves of AISNe occur earlier than
those of standard pair-instability supernovae by 10–20 days when the ALP mass
is equal to the electron mass. Also, the event rate of AISNe is 1.7–2.6 times
higher than that of pair-instability supernovae, depending on the high mass
cutoff of the initial mass function.

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