Axion Constraints from White Dwarf Cooling in 47 Tucanae
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We analyse the cooling of white dwarfs in the globular cluster 47 Tucanae to look for evidence of axion emission affecting the rate of white dwarf cooling. If axions exist and couple to electrons, then axions could be produced at an appreciable rate in the electron-degenerate core of a white dwarf through axion bremsstrahlung from electrons. The emission of these axions would provide an additional cooling mechanism for white dwarfs that would affect the cooling rate, and hints of axions have been suggested based on observations of anomalous cooling reported for white dwarfs in the Galactic disc and halo. We performed stellar evolution simulations of white dwarf cooling that accounted for the additional energy loss due to axion bremsstrahlung from electrons, producing a suite of white dwarf cooling models for different values of the axion-electron coupling constant, as well as the white dwarf mass and envelope thickness. These cooling models are compared to observations of white dwarfs in 47 Tucanae from the Hubble Space Telescope through an unbinned likelihood analysis. The optimal model found by this analysis corresponds to the case of no axion emission with a thick white dwarf envelope, and we find a new bound on the axion-electron coupling of $g_{aee} \leq 0.81 \times 10^{-13}$ at 95% confidence level, conditional on the adopted white dwarf cooling models and priors. This bound improves upon the previous white dwarf cooling bound for this coupling and excludes the range of values favoured by the axion hints from the anomalous cooling of Galactic white dwarfs.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".