Reexamining the Solar Axion Explanation for the XENON1T Excess

Christina Gao; Jia Liu; Lian-Tao Wang; Xiao-Ping Wang; Wei Xue; Yi-Ming Zhong

doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.125.131806

Reexamining the Solar Axion Explanation for the XENON1T Excess

Christina Gao^*
, Jia Liu^*
, Lian-Tao Wang^*
, Xiao-Ping Wang^*
, Wei Xue^*
, Yi-Ming Zhong^*

^*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Journal Publications and Reviews › RGC 21 - Publication in refereed journal › peer-review

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Abstract

The XENON1T collaboration has observed an excess in electronic recoil events below 5 keV over the known background, which could originate from beyond-the-standard-model physics. The solar axion is a well-motivated model that has been proposed to explain the excess, though it has tension with astrophysical observations. The axions traveling from the Sun can be absorbed by the electrons in the xenon atoms via the axion-electron coupling. Meanwhile, they can also scatter with the atoms through the inverse Primakoff process via the axion-photon coupling, which emits a photon and mimics the electronic recoil signals. We found that the latter process cannot be neglected. After including the keV photon produced via the inverse Primakoff process in the detection, the tension with the astrophysical constraints can be significantly reduced. We also explore scenarios involving additional new physics to further alleviate the tension with the astrophysical bounds. © 2020 authors. Published by the American Physical Society.

Original language	English
Article number	131806
Journal	Physical Review Letters
Volume	125
Issue number	13
Online published	24 Sept 2020
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.125.131806
Publication status	Published - 25 Sept 2020
Externally published	Yes

Funding

We would like thank Luca Grandi, Tarek Saab, Evan Shockley for discussing in detail the response to the electron and photon in the XENON1T detector, Fei Gao, Jingqiang Ye for the details of fit and the analysis, Aaron Pierce and Sergey Sibiryakov for the axion models and constraints, and Maurizio Giannotti, Andreas Ringwald, and Oscar Straniero for clarifying the weighted average for the 𝑅 parameter and the theoretical prediction formula. C. G. is supported by Fermi Research Alliance, LLC under Contract No. DE-AC02-07CH11359, J. L. acknowledges support by an Oehme Fellowship, L. T. W. is supported by the DOE Grant No. DE-SC0013642, X. P. W. is supported by the DOE Grant No. DE-AC02-06CH11357, W. X. is supported by the DOE Grant No. DE-SC0010296, and Y. Z. is supported by the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago through an endowment from the Kavli Foundation and its founder Fred Kavli. J. L. and X. P. W. have moved to Peking University and Beihang University respectively, during the review and revision processes.

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abstract = "The XENON1T collaboration has observed an excess in electronic recoil events below 5 keV over the known background, which could originate from beyond-the-standard-model physics. The solar axion is a well-motivated model that has been proposed to explain the excess, though it has tension with astrophysical observations. The axions traveling from the Sun can be absorbed by the electrons in the xenon atoms via the axion-electron coupling. Meanwhile, they can also scatter with the atoms through the inverse Primakoff process via the axion-photon coupling, which emits a photon and mimics the electronic recoil signals. We found that the latter process cannot be neglected. After including the keV photon produced via the inverse Primakoff process in the detection, the tension with the astrophysical constraints can be significantly reduced. We also explore scenarios involving additional new physics to further alleviate the tension with the astrophysical bounds. {\textcopyright} 2020 authors. Published by the American Physical Society.",

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Reexamining the Solar Axion Explanation for the XENON1T Excess

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