Year: 2021
Type: article
Abstract: The excess of electron recoil events seen by the XENON1T experiment has been interpreted as a potential signal of axion-like particles (ALPs), either produced in the Sun, or constituting part of the dark matter halo of the Milky Way. It has also been explained as a consequence of trace amounts of tritium in the experiment. We consider the evidence for the solar and dark-matter ALP hypotheses from the combination of XENON1T data and multiple astrophysical probes, including horizontal branch stars, red giants, and white dwarfs. We briefly address the influence of ALP decays and supernova cooling. While the different datasets are in clear tension for the case of solar ALPs, all measurements can be simultaneously accommodated for the case of a sub-dominant fraction of dark-matter ALPs. Nevertheless, this solution requires the tuning of several a priori unknown parameters, such that for our choices of priors a Bayesian analysis shows no strong preference for the ALP interpretation of the XENON1T excess over the background hypothesis.
Source: Journal of High Energy Physics
Authors: Peter Athron, Csaba Balázs, Ankit Beniwal, J. Eliel Camargo-Molina, Andrew Fowlie, Tomás E. Gonzalo, Sebastian Hoof, Felix Kahlhoefer, David J. E. Marsh, Markus Tobias Prim, Andre Scaffidi, Pat Scott, Wei Su, Martin White, Lei Wu, Yang Zhang
Institutions: Nanjing Normal University, Monash University, UCLouvain, KU Leuven, Imperial College London, University of Göttingen, RWTH Aachen University, King's College London, University of Bonn, Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare, Sezione di Torino, The University of Queensland, ARC Centre of Excellence for Dark Matter Particle Physics, The University of Adelaide, Zhengzhou University
Language: English
Subfield: Nuclear and High Energy Physics
Field: Physics and Astronomy
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
Funders: Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung, Nanjing Normal University, Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, National Natural Science Foundation of China, Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe AISBL, Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung, Centre of Excellence for Particle Physics at the Terascale, Australian Research Council, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Ministero dell’Istruzione, dell’Università e della Ricerca, Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, Science and Technology Facilities Council, Australian Research Council
Awards: Optimising the search for the next discovery in particle physics, Understanding physics through flexible calculations, The Dark Universe: A Synergic Multimessenger Approach, G4129128221, G4171073483, Converging on new particles and fundamental symmetries, M-Theory, Cosmology and Quantum Field Theory, G5174800203, G5528654823, G7436696666
OpenAlex ID: W3040961773