White Dwarfs constrain Dark Forces

TL;DR

White dwarf luminosity functions serve as precise astrophysical tests for new light particles and dark forces, providing constraints often surpassing current laboratory experiments.

Contribution

This work derives new constraints on light hidden sector particles and dark forces using white dwarf cooling data, surpassing many existing experimental bounds.

Findings

Strong constraints on dark force models with particles lighter than tens of keV.

White dwarf data exclude significant parameter space for hidden sector particles.

Astrophysical observations outperform some laboratory searches in probing new physics.

Abstract

The white dwarf luminosity function, which provides information about their cooling, has been measured with high precision in the past few years. Simulations that include well known Standard Model physics give a good fit to the data. This leaves little room for new physics and makes these astrophysical objects a good laboratory for testing models beyond the Standard Model. It has already been suggested that white dwarfs might provide some evidence for the existence of axions. In this work we study the constraints that the white dwarf luminosity function puts on physics beyond the Standard Model involving new light particles (fermions or bosons) that can be pair-produced in a white dwarf and then escape to contribute to its cooling. We show, in particular, that we can severely constrain the parameter space of models with dark forces and light hidden sectors (lighter than a few tens of keV). The bounds we find are often more competitive than those from current lab searches and those expected from most future searches.