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  • Open Access

Supernova constraints on lepton flavor violating axions

Yonglin Li and Zuowei Liu*

  • *Contact author: zuoweiliu@nju.edu.cn
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Phys. Rev. D 113, 055039 – Published 25 March, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/dmnx-3t96

Abstract

Supernovae offer a unique hot and dense environment to probe new physics beyond the Standard Model. We investigate supernova cooling constraints on lepton-flavor-violating (LFV) axions and axionlike particles (ALPs) that couple to electrons and muons. For LFV-ALP production in supernovae, muon decay and lepton bremsstrahlung have been considered previously. In this work, we identify the electron-muon coalescence channel as an efficient new production mechanism in the high-mass regime. We also include the semi-Compton scattering process, which has recently been shown to provide sizable contributions for electron-coupled ALPs. We find that muon decay dominates in the low-mass regime, electron-muon coalescence becomes the leading channel at high masses, and semi-Compton scattering provides the dominant contribution in the intermediate mass range. We find that the electron-muon coalescence process yields the strongest constraints in the mass range of ∼(115,280)  MeV, probing the ALP-electron-muon coupling down to ∼4×10−10 for an ALP mass of ∼200  MeV.

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Phys. Rev. D 113, 055039– Published 25 March, 2026
  • Received 14 May 2025
  • Accepted 9 February 2026
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by SCOAP3.

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