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Millicharged Particle Production in Pulsars via the Schwinger Effect

Chris Kouvaris, Ian M. Shoemaker

Abstract

Low mass particles with small electric charges can be produced abundantly in large electric fields via the Schwinger effect. We study the production rate of such particles inside the polar gap of nearby pulsars. After production they are accelerated above MeV energies by the local electric fields. These pulsar-produced millicharged particles can be detected at Earth in low-threshold dark matter direct detection experiments. We find that the current XENONnT data constrains millicharged particles produced in the Crab pulsar to have charges less than $O(10^{-6})$ for sub-eV masses.

Millicharged Particle Production in Pulsars via the Schwinger Effect

Abstract

Low mass particles with small electric charges can be produced abundantly in large electric fields via the Schwinger effect. We study the production rate of such particles inside the polar gap of nearby pulsars. After production they are accelerated above MeV energies by the local electric fields. These pulsar-produced millicharged particles can be detected at Earth in low-threshold dark matter direct detection experiments. We find that the current XENONnT data constrains millicharged particles produced in the Crab pulsar to have charges less than for sub-eV masses.

Paper Structure

This paper contains 1 section, 19 equations, 2 figures.

Table of Contents

  1. Acknowlegements

Figures (2)

  • Figure 1: Here we display the MCP flux arriving at Earth from a pulsar at a distance of $L=1$ kpc. In this representative example we have fixed $\epsilon =10^{-7}$ and $m_{X} = 0.1$ eV.
  • Figure 2: ( Upper panel:) An example XENONnT electron recoil event rate from MCPs produced in the Crab Pulsar. ( Lower panel:) The corresponding 90$\%$ CL bounds on the MCP properties with recent XENONnT data XENON:2022ltv, and a projection for DARWIN. Existing bound from the PVLAS collaboration are shown in gray, while the dashed curve is a naive extrapolation of their published bounds Ahlers:2007qfDellaValle:2014xoa, along with the recent bounds from CONNIE and Atucha II CONNIE:2024off.