• Accepted Paper

Enhanced stellar production of weakly interacting slim particles from nonthermal nuclear cascades

Víctor Fonoll, Maurizio Giannotti, and Giuseppe Lucente

Phys. Rev. D - Accepted 3 November, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/lq2w-w6vp

Abstract

Weakly interacting slim particles (WISPs) can be produced in stars through the conversion of non-thermal photons generated in nuclear reactions. Previous studies have generally treated these sources only at the level of their primary injection lines. We show that this picture is incomplete: repeated Compton scatterings redistribute the injected photons into a broad low-energy spectrum, while associated positrons can thermalize and annihilate into a 511~keV line. Together, these effects define a generic non-thermal photon reservoir and thus a broadly applicable source term for any photon-coupled WISP. We develop a general framework for this mechanism and illustrate its impact with the example of dark-photon production in the solar pp chain. Our results show that non-thermal stellar WISP production can be substantially underestimated if Compton reprocessing and positron annihilation are neglected. We further identify the energy window above ≃90~keV, where this reprocessed reservoir becomes the dominant source of solar WISPs, and we characterize the spectral signature it predicts there.

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