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Updated: Aug 28, 2025

X-ray Beam Induced Current Measurements for Multi-Modal X-ray Microscopy of Solar Cells
Published on: August 20, 2019
First Indirect Detection Constraints on Axions in the Solar Basin
William DeRocco1, Shalma Wegsman2, Brian Grefenstette3
1Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics, University of California, Santa Cruz, California 95062, USA.
Abstract:
Axions with masses of order keV can be produced in great abundance within the Solar core. The majority of Sun-produced axions escape to infinity, but a small fraction of the flux is produced with speeds below the escape velocity. Over time, this process populates a basin of slow-moving axions trapped on bound orbits. These axions can decay to two photons, yielding an observable signature. We place the first limits on this solar basin of axions using recent quiescent solar observations made by the NuSTAR x-ray telescope. We compare three different methodologies for setting constraints, and obtain world-leading limits for axions with masses between 5 and 30 keV, in some cases improving on stellar cooling bounds by more than an order of magnitude in coupling.
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