Axions and White Dwarfs

TL;DR

White dwarfs serve as natural laboratories for testing new physics ideas, such as axions, due to their well-understood structure and extensive observational data, enabling constraints on particle properties.

Contribution

This paper evaluates the robustness of using white dwarf observations to test axion physics, highlighting the method's reliability and potential for new physics constraints.

Findings

White dwarfs are effective probes for axion properties.

The method shows robustness in constraining axion parameters.

White dwarf cooling models can be used to test particle physics theories.

Abstract

White dwarfs are almost completely degenerate objects that cannot obtain energy from the thermonuclear sources and their evolution is just a gravothermal process of cooling. The simplicity of these objects, the fact that the physical inputs necessary to understand them are well identified, although not always well understood, and the impressive observational background about white dwarfs make them the most well studied Galactic population. These characteristics allow to use them as laboratories to test new ideas of physics. In this contribution we discuss the robustness of the method and its application to the axion case.