Seminario. Alessandro Lella (Università degli Studi di Bari)

 Speaker Name: Alessandro Lella
Affiliation: Università degli Studi di Bari

Title: CORE-COLLAPSE SUPERNOVAE SHINING IN AXION-LIKE PARTICLES

Abstract: Core-collapse Supernovae (SN) are among the most powerful astrophysical sources of feebly-interacting particles. Indeed, the extreme conditions of temperature and density reached after the gravitational collapse make the SN core a unique environment to have a significant production of novel exotic particles, such as axions and axion-like particles.  In this seminar, I will argue that axions and ALPs could be copiously produced in a SN core by means of their coupling with nuclear matter. In particular, I will show how the ALP parameter space can be severely constrained by employing observations of the neutrino burst from SN 1987A. Moreover, if ALPs are also coupled to photons, they are provided with a vast phenomenology related to radiative decays and ALP-photon oscillations in Galactic magnetic fields. These phenomena might lead to observable signatures of new physics.  Finally, I will also discuss how the detection of an ALP induced gamma-ray burst may shed light on some of the main features characterizing the SN core.