Impact of Dark Photon Emission on Massive Star Evolution and Pre-Supernova Neutrino Signal

Understand

We study the effects of additional cooling due to the emission of a dark matter candidate particle, the dark photon, on the final phases of the evolution of a $15\,M_\odot$ star and resulting modifications of the pre-supernova neutrino signal.

• For a substantial portion of the dark photon parameter space the extra cooling speeds up Si burning, which results in a reduced number of neutrinos emitted during the last day before core collapse.
• This reduction can be described by a systematic acceleration of the relevant timescales and the results can be estimated semi-analytically in good agreement with the numerical simulations.
• Outside the semi-analytic regime we find more complicated effects.