White dwarfs as Physics laboratories: lights and shadows

TL;DR

This paper reviews how white dwarf observations serve as natural laboratories for testing fundamental physics, including gravity, neutrino properties, and dark matter, by analyzing their cooling processes and pulsation period changes.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive review of methods using white dwarf data to constrain new physics beyond standard models.

Findings

White dwarf cooling rates can test gravitational and particle physics theories.

Observations of pulsation period drifts set bounds on fundamental constants and particle properties.

Large surveys enable statistically significant tests of physics using white dwarf populations.

Abstract

The evolution of white dwarfs is essentially a gravothermal process of cooling in which the basic ingredients for predicting their evolution are well identified, although not always well understood. There are two independent ways to test the cooling rate. One is the luminosity function of the white dwarf population, and another is the secular drift of the period of pulsation of those individuals that experience variations. Both scenarios are sensitive to the cooling or heating time scales, for which reason, the inclusion of any additional source or sink of energy will modify these properties and will allow to set bounds to these perturbations. These studies also require complete and statistical significant samples for which current large data surveys are providing an unprecedented wealth of information. In this paper we review how these techniques are applied to several cases like the secular drift of the Newton gravitational constant, neutrino magnetic moments, axions and weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPS).