Long-lived particles and the quiet Sun

Creators: Gustafson, R. Andrew; Plestid, Ryan; Shoemaker, Ian M.; Zhou, Albert

Abstract

The nuclear reaction network within the interior of the Sun is an efficient MeV physics factory and can produce long-lived particles generic to dark sector models. In this work we consider the sensitivity of satellite instruments, primarily the RHESSI spectrometer, that observe the quiet Sun in the MeV regime where backgrounds are low. We find that quiet Sun observations offer a powerful and complementary probe in regions of parameter space, where the long-lived particle decay length is longer than the radius of the Sun and shorter than the distance between the Sun and Earth. We comment on connections to recent model-building work on heavy neutral leptons coupled to neutrinos and high-quality axions from mirror symmetries.

Copyright and License

Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the 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.

Funding

Funded by SCOAP³.

Acknowledgement

This work benefited from feedback at the Simon’s Center for Geometry and Physics, and R. P. would like to specifically thank Simon Knapen, Rebecca Leanne, and Jessie Shelton for useful discussions. We thank Albert Shih for helpful discussions regarding the RHESSI instrument. We benefited from feedback on this manuscript from Rebccea Leanne and Elena Pinetti. R. P. is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of High Energy Physics, under Award No. DE-SC0011632 and by the Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics. R. P. is supported by the Neutrino Theory Network under Grant No. DEAC02-07CHI11359, the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of High Energy Physics, under Award No. DE-SC0011632, and by the Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics. I. M. S. and R. A. G. are supported by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science, Office of High Energy Physics, under Award No. DE-SC0020262.

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PhysRevD.109.015020.pdf

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