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Fresh look at the diffuse ALP background from supernovae

Francisco R. Candón1,*, Sougata Ganguly2,†, Maurizio Giannotti1,3,‡, Tanmoy Kumar4,§, Alessandro Lella5,6,∥, and Federico Mescia7,¶

  • *Contact author: francandon@unizar.es
  • †Contact author: sganguly0205@ibs.re.kr
  • ‡Contact author: mgiannotti@unizar.es
  • §Contact author: kumartanmoy1998@gmail.com
  • ∥Contact author: alessandro.lella@ba.infn.it
  • Contact author: federico.mescia@lnf.infn.it
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Phys. Rev. D 112, 015006 – Published 8 July, 2025

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/d194-7t6x

Abstract

Protoneutron stars, highly compact objects formed in the core of exploding supernovae (SNe), are powerful sources of axionlike particles (ALPs). In the SN core, ALPs are dominantly produced via nucleon-nucleon bremsstrahlung and pion conversion, resulting in an energetic ALP spectrum peaked at energies O(100)  MeV. In this work, we revisit the diffuse ALP background, produced from all past core-collapse supernovae, and update the constraints derived from Fermi-LAT observations. Assuming the maximum ALP-nucleon coupling allowed by the SN 1987A cooling, we set the upper limit gaγγ≲2×10−13  GeV−1 for ALP mass ma≲10−10  eV, which is approximately a factor of two improvement with respect to the existing bounds. On the other hand, for ma≳10−10  eV, we find that including pion conversion strengthens the bound on gaγγ, approximately by a factor of two compared to the constraint obtained from bremsstrahlung alone. Additionally, we present a sensitivity study for future experiments such as AMEGO-X, e-ASTROGAM, GRAMS-balloon, GRAMS-satellite, and MAST. We find that the expected constraint from MAST would be comparable to Fermi-LAT bound. However, SN 1987A constraint remains one order of magnitude stronger as compared to the bound derived from the current and future gamma-ray telescopes.

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Phys. Rev. D 112, 015006– Published 8 July, 2025
  • Received 20 May 2025
  • Accepted 23 June 2025
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